I recently finished a two-day Bootcamp for about a dozen entrepreneurs at my office in Boise, Idaho. We had a variety of people in the room, including lawyers, doctors, HVAC owners, and real estate brokers.
One common question I get asked about my trainings is this: “Since everyone attending isn’t in my industry, will the information be useful for me?”
This question cracks me up.
I’m a fan of paying attention to what’s going on in your industry, but it shouldn’t be the only place you look for new information. If all you do is focus on your industry, you’ll never find innovation. The “gurus” who are selling you “industry-specific” info are not going to industry events to find new tactics for you; they’re looking outside your industry.
It’s not that I’m not a fan of industry events; I recently hosted a training on marketing and sales for law firms. Some of the content was new and shiny marketing, but some of it was foundational, which doesn’t have to be industry-specific. You can do all the new, shiny marketing you want, but if you’re missing the foundational pieces, it won’t work.
For example, one of the trainings I did had three parts:
- The key elements of any good marketing campaign
- How to identify the issues in a marketing campaign
- How to scale your marketing campaign
Scaling Your Marketing Campaign
In the “how to scale” section, so many people want to go from paying for marketing straight to turning a profit with massive volume. Heck, I want that, as well. Unfortunately, that isn’t how most marketing should be scaled. Here is a down-and-dirty explanation of Step 3:
The first goal of any new campaign is response.
If you create a new campaign and get zero response, it is difficult to multiply those zeros to get a whole number. When you get a goose egg from a campaign, you need to go back to Step 1 of the training.
Once you have a response, you need to get volume.
With volume, you now have an idea of the scope of interest based on your advertising spend, and you can determine if it makes sense to continue with this campaign or not. If you can’t get volume, you again need to go back to Step 1 and make adjustments.
(By the way, I know Step 1 isn’t in this blog post; this is adapted from a 90-minute presentation, and I want to go over this specific info, but you can find a lot of great resources on our blog, such as this one!)
Once you have response and volume, you need efficiency.
Can you get quality leads who convert into customers from this campaign? If the answer is no, you need to revisit Step 2.
Scaling Up
This is how you scale a new marketing campaign, but most people want to cut a check to the vendor or advertising agency and slide right into efficiency. Sometimes that works, but more often than not, it’s a total failure. This wastes a ton of good money and a potential source for quality leads.
This is the foundational info you need to grow and scale any company, and it applies to every industry.
The foundational systems and processes aren’t simply for marketing and sales; you need systems and processes for running your business, hiring, firing, etc.
If you’ve stalled out, aren’t growing, or are simply growing slower than you’d like, it may be time to go back to the foundation and figure out where things went wrong. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater by looking for another shiny object. It won’t work if the foundation is broken.
