What To Do When You Are Investing In Marketing With Little Or No Return

What To Do When You Are Investing In Marketing With Little Or No Return

Are you investing in marketing with little or no return? Several weeks ago, I had a conversation with a potential client that is in this exact situation. They are experiencing this exact problem. So what I want to do today is break down that discussion to help you remove this roadblock. So I hope you find this conversation helpful.

I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. Here at Rialto Marketing, we believe you've got to remove your revenue roadblocks if you want to accelerate revenue growth. If this is a boat that you are in, we can certainly help and we'd be happy to chat with you.

So here's the reality. Most marketing you do is not going to work, but the marketing that does work is going to make up for all of that in spades. That's just the reality of it. But the problem is, if you can't even identify what's working, you are bound to experience little or no return with your marketing, which is not good. Okay? Marketing is an investment that you should get a return on. It is not an expense. So I want to break down this conversation.There's four elements I'm going to talk about here.

One is the situation this client was in. Two, the results that they experienced. Three is the mistakes that I believe they made. And I hope you'll learn from this as I go through this. And then what I think the solution is what the next step should be to get out of this situation if you find yourself in it.

A Rundown of the Situation and the Results Prospective Clients Experience

So here's the situation for this particular prospective client. And by the way, they are not in a boat by themselves. There are so many people that are experiencing this same problem. So if you are experiencing this problem, you are not alone. But here's the situation for this particular prospective client. One, they're a B2B professional service firm. Somewhere in that $2 million a year revenue range. You know, I think 10 to 15 employees somewhere around there. The owners about 18 months ago, came to the realization they knew that they needed to invest more heavily in marketing. They want to grow. They've been growing at about 30% a year. But they knew at the time that the current marketing they were doing was not going to allow them to scale where they wanted to. So they needed to start investing in other marketing channels. Kudos to them for getting to that place, because there are a lot of businesses that are in this. They're building their business off of referrals. Nothing wrong with that. Referrals are fantastic, but it is not a way to scale a business. You are going to hit a ceiling, okay? I promise you that. That's the situation they were in.

So 18 months ago, they decided to start working with a marketing agency. That agency did some target market work. I can't tell you exactly what they did, but they did some work to identify who their ideal clients are. And then from there, they started investing in paid advertising online. They were doing Google Ads. They were doing search engine optimization work and content creation. Those are the four things that they focused on. And this client was spending somewhere in the neighborhood of 3000, $4,000 a month with this agency. Early on, they were actually spending more than that with their ad spend, with Google Ads. But since they started working with them, they started to pull back on Google Ads. So they're somewhere in that $3,000 a month range. Okay, so that's the situation.

Here's the results. In 18 months, they have picked up one new client from this one new client, and somewhere in the neighborhood of three to four leads. So over 18 months, three to four leads, one new client, they got a return, but very little. And this is a return that they're not going to see for a long, long time. The lifetime value of their clients is very high. So one client is worth a lot to them over the long term, but this is not a situation that any of us want to find ourselves in. They are right at that little to no return. Right now, there's no return long term. There will be a return, but not much.

The Mistakes Prospective Clients Make

So what are the mistakes that I see coming out of this conversation that I have with this prospective client? There are a few things, again, and they are not in the boat by themselves. I see people making this mistake all the time.

One, I think they put the cart before the horse. And this is not necessarily their fault. If marketing is not your thing, it's really hard to do this effectively. It's just like if you're not a doctor, you have no business self diagnosing yourself. You are bound to make mistakes. This situation is no different. But I believe they chose their marketing vehicles, content, SEO, paid advertising, or PPC. Nothing wrong with those vehicles. But some of the fundamentals that need to be in place were either not in place or out of alignment. And the fundamentals, the strategy behind your marketing, is the fuel for your vehicles. So I believe that the vehicles that they were using had no fuel. We all know that's not going to work, right? You can push the car down the road for a little bit, but at some point it's just going to stop. You can't push it anymore. So it's not going to be effective long term when you don't have the fuel for the vehicles that you're using. And that's what I think happened here. It was very obvious to me when I went to their website that their marketing message, which goes back to the fundamentals, their strategy behind what they're doing, was not where it needed to be. It wasn't clear, it wasn't compelling. Right? It wasn't a differentiator. That made them the obvious choice compared to any of their other competitors. So they're spending money driving traffic to their website through SEO, and it's not where it needs to be. That website was not set up to convert. So they're spending money driving traffic to a website that's not going to convert. They put the cart before the horse. I can only assume that the same thing. Is that's the exact same thing that was happening with their paid advertising efforts? They didn't have the right message. I'm assuming that their target market work was on point, but if that's not on point, they easily could have been targeting the wrong people with their SEO efforts and their paid advertising. And that's another reason why things didn't convert.

The 3 Steps You Can Take to Get Out of this Situation

So we talked about the situation, the results, the mistakes that I believe they made. So what's the solution in this case? If you find yourself in this case and just forget the marketing vehicles that this particular business was using, if you're in the situation where you're investing in marketing, but you've got little or no return, it doesn't matter what vehicles you were using. Here's the solution. Here's what's going to help you get back on the right path. There are three steps that I think you can take if you're in this situation. One is you need to assess where you are. You cannot create a plan to get where you want to go until you know where you're starting from. It's no different than your GPS can't tell me how to get to the airport until I first tell it where I'm starting from. So you need to get a baseline of where you're at, what's in place, what's not working right, why it might not be working. When you assess where you're at, you can unlock your growth and profit opportunities. That's why this stuff is so critical in the beginning.

The second thing you do after you assess is you got to make sure you've got the fundamentals in place. I kind of already touched on this, but with the fundamentals, you're looking at your target market and who your ideal clients are within that market, and then the message that you need to use to engage those ideal clients and get them to want to take action. Okay, when you get these fundamentals in place, this is going to help you establish your competitive advantage so that you can attract more of your ideal clients.

And then the third thing that you can do is create your roadmap. Okay. Once you know where you're at and you've got the fundamentals in place, now you need to create a roadmap, a plan of what vehicles you're going to use to get where you want to go. When you create a proper roadmap, this helps give you the marketing direction and focus you need to be successful. So if you're in a situation where you're investing in marketing with little or no return, these are the first three steps I would recommend you take. Assess where you are, focus on the fundamentals, and then create your roadmap. These three things are going to again, unlock your growth and profit opportunities. They're going to help you establish your competitive advantage so that you can attract more ideal clients, and it's going to give you the marketing direction and focus you need to be successful.

Conclusion: What To Do When You Are Investing In Marketing With Little Or No Return

I hope you found this helpful. People are making this mistake all over the place and it doesn't need to happen. But when you're battling information overload with marketing, it's so easy to just jump right into the tactics. But if we jump into the tactics before making sure that we have that proper foundation in place, you're bound to waste time and money on marketing. That's just not going to work.

If you need more help with this, more outside eyes, hop on over to our website. Go to rialtomarketing.com. That's R-I-A-L-T-O Marketing.com and book a free GPS call. I would be happy to talk to you, learn more about where you're at, where you want to get to, and help guide you in the direction that's going to make the most sense for you. The other tool, if you're not quite ready to jump on a call, totally okay is over at revenueroadblockscorecard.com. At Revenueroadblockscorecard.com, you can get visibility to your revenue roadblocks so that you can discover and assess which of the nine revenue roadblocks are slowing down your revenue growth. It takes less than five minutes to get your personalized report. If that's something that sounds interesting to you, head on over to there.

Again, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. And till next time, take care.