A lot of small business owners are ignorant when it comes to marketing. It isn’t their fault, they just have not been properly trained. They were trained in plumbing or interior design or basket-weaving or whatever it is their particular trade is.
So, they look to the experts. Although the traditional “experts” have been the people who work for the advertising media, such as the yellow pages, the newspaper, etc. These media companies have people on staff who will design an ad for your company so you, the business owner, don’t have to deal with it.
Business owners happily spend their hard-won dollars on these media because that is what business have always done. Very few properly track their ROI (Return on Investment) and just trust that these methods are helping their businesses.
The media will print the ads and distribute them in whatever way they do, and cross their fingers that someone will respond to the ads they sold to these business owners.
But they do business by a double standard. They say they will do their best, but won’t guarantee results.
So, my question to all the advertising media is “Why not?”
If you take your car to be repaired, you expect to get results. If you call a plumber, you expect him to fix your leaky faucet. If you purchase a widget, you expect it to properly widgetize.
We live in a society where people expect guarantees. It is expecting that if you are selling a product or service, that it actually does what it is supposed to.
I can only think of two industries that do not play by those rules. Medicine and Marketing.
I’m not going to get into the medical issue. Too big, too messy, and one I am completely unqualified to make an educated argument about.
But marketing, however, that’s a whole different bird.
If you were just selling ad design, then that would be an issue where you could say “You wanted an ad, you got an ad. No guarantee of effectiveness implied.” But they don’t do that. They say “We will design an ad for you to use in our publication, because advertising with us will help your business.”
These business owners look to these folks as the experts, and if their ad doesn’t get a good response, that business owner thinks “This kind of marketing doesn’t work.” And that is just a lie. ANY type of marketing, if done correctly, can produce measurable results, which can then be analyzed to see if that is a strategy that should be continued, modified, or eliminated.
If you are a business owner and someone wants to sell you on committing marketing dollars to their proposal, make them put their money where their mouths are. If someone is not accountable for the results they produce, then they really don’t care what those results are.
If they paid attention to the results they were getting for their clients, then they could constantly improve and could easily justify their rising costs, rather than running around, cold-calling to find the next sucker they can get to try them out with no guarantees on results.
Anyone who has any confidence in their product or service should offer guarantees. If they aren’t, then why should you settle for less?
