Sales and Marketing Secrets » Keeping Your Marketing Fresh

Reflections on the 80/20 Rule

Dr. Rachna D. Jain — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:00:04 +0000

You might have heard of the Pareto Principle, which is also referred to as the 80/20 Rule. Now, the Pareto Principle says that 80 percent of your results come from 20 percent of your efforts.

For business owners the question always is – Well, which 20 percent is giving me the 80 percent of my results? When you look at the 80/20 principle, you can assess that in several ways.

The first way is to recognize that about 20 percent of your marketing efforts are giving you 80 percent of your results. So, your goal than is to track all the effects or the results of your marketing to understand what 20 percent is giving you 80 percent of your results.

So, the goal than is not to keep increasing the ways that you market, especially if you find that difficult to do. The goal is to try and understand which of your marketing avenues are returning the best and then to do more of those.

So, a way that you might track your marketing efforts would be to take an Excel sheet or any kind of spreadsheet and to set up on Column A all of the ways that you are marketing. Than in Column B, you want to set up all of the ways that you can track the success of your marketing.

So, let’s say in Column A you have a newsletter, and that’s your one way that your market. Column B might be what you could measure. That might be clicks; how many people open the newsletter or read the newsletter or take an action from the newsletter. You could also measure how many people are on the list and whether that’s growing or getting smaller. You also could measure how many people take the action you want them to take. So, if you wanted them to click on something and get more information or click on something and download it; you can measure all of those things.

Then, in the 3^rd column, you’d want to track where you are now, and at periodic intervals; whether that be once a week or once a month. I typically like to use once a month because that tends to give you a larger view; however, if your business is changing more rapidly than that or for some reason you need to track it more often, you certainly can do that on a weekly basis. So, that would be an example on one marketing avenue that you could track.

The second marketing avenue that you could track would be something such as RSS Feed subscriptions. If you run a blog or you offer a podcast or anything like that, you should be able to track the number of subscribers, how many people click back to your website, things like that. You go there and go forward on that.

Then, the other thing you need to do is you need to put into your closing (closing means how you bring somebody into your business, so your sales process ends with you asking for the business). So, when somebody calls you and they say they’d like to hire you to do this service for me; you need to get in the habit of asking them – How did you hear about us? Start to track that against your marketing avenues. So, if you are getting a lot of clients calling you or even just a few; even 3 or 4 a week, especially if you are professional services provider, just get in the habit of asking them how they heard about you.

When you have people buying things from your website, be sure to ask them – How did you hear about us? That will start to give you a sense of where the traffic is coming from or where people are taking action from.

The results may surprise you. You may find that your newsletter really isn’t bringing you a lot of business, but your RSS Feed is (for example). So, in that case, what you’d want to do is find ways to market your RSS Feed more significantly, and you’d also want to find ways to pull back or limit on your email newsletter. This becomes especially important when you are spending money to get your newsletter produced. That means that either you are taking your own time to do it, or you are using your assistant or your Virtual Assistant to do the newsletter for you.

So, by keeping track of these metrics, if will help you understand where the 20 percent of your efforts is giving you the 80 percent of your results.

The other area to look at this in is with your clients. In any business, you are going to have about 20 percent of your clients that are providing 80 percent of your satisfaction, or 80 percent of your income, or 80 percent of your value. Those are the kinds of clients that you want to cultivate. You don’t want to try to market to everyone. You just want to market to people who are more like that 20 percent that’s having the most significant impact on your business.

So, when you look at applying the 80/20 Rule to your business, be sure to measure which 20 percent of your efforts in all your areas are giving you the maximum results. Than, the goal is to do more and more of what’s already working.

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The Benefits of Spaghetti Marketing

Dr. Rachna D. Jain — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 12:00:38 +0000

Spaghetti Marketing refers to the idea that you throw out a whole lot of marketing, and you see what sticks. So, the symbol, or the example would be that you throw a pot of spaghetti against the wall, and you see what sticks to it. So, the concept of Spaghetti Marketing is actually useful in a couple of situations.

The situations where Spaghetti Marketing is useful is when you are launching a new product or service, and you’re not exactly certain of the best way to actually promote or market it. You will have some information of course because you will have done some market research or you would have thought through whom it is you are targeting and how you might reach them.

But, the fact is that nobody can ever predict what marketing will actually catch fire and what marketing will actually fizzle. If you look at examples like the subservient chicken at SubservientChicken.com, which was Burger King’s foray into new media marketing; at this site, what you’ll see is that you can type in commands, and the chicken will do whatever you ask it to do. It’s basically a person in a chicken suit who will take whatever actions you want them to take.

This was a huge marketing gain for Burger King, but it actually also could have not gone so well because what if people didn’t like the chicken? In some ways, they had to put it out there and see what worked. In a way, this was a form of Spaghetti Marketing.

As a professional services provider, you obviously want to get the most benefit for your efforts as often as you can because your time and your energy are limited. If you are solely responsible for marketing your practice, attending to your clients and providing them services, making sure all the payments come in, doing your own accounting; all of the tasks that go with running a small service business – what you want to be very, very sure of is that you get a lot of return on your marketing investment.

That works out really, really well except in those cases where your existing marketing isn’t working. So, in those times (and they happen to all of us) when your marketing is less effective or it’s not working like you planned, than you need to adopt the idea of Spaghetti Marketing.

So, Spaghetti Marketing means that you try something different than what you’ve been doing, and you do it even if it feels uncomfortable or especially if it feels uncomfortable.

So, you go ahead and you put out a ton of stuff. You may have to get up a little bit earlier in the morning or go to bed a little bit later in order to launch these marketing initiatives. While that’s not a good long-term strategy, in the short term it can be very beneficial; especially if your daily life is already overly scheduled or highly crammed with responsibilities.

The idea is that you look at other ways to market, and you give yourself a chance to put out into the world a lot of different methods or avenues to share your work or your product. Than, you see what kind of results you get. When you get results (and you will, one way or the other), you start to improve on what’s working, and you let go of what doesn’t.

So, if you want to bring more business into your business; than what you have to do is you have to be able to keep doing what works, and be open to finding new things. Sometimes the idea is that you would be inefficient in doing that, but it’s better always to put something out there today rather than wait to perfect it and never actually expose it to the marketplace.

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Small Favor and Free Gift

Dr. Rachna D. Jain — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 01:39:08 +0000

Would you have 10 minutes (or less!) to do me a small favor? I've put together a short survey on your business sales and marketing because I'm interested in learning more about you and your business. This will help me provide timely, relevant, and helpful content.

You can access the survey here:

Tell me about your business…

And I know I mentioned a free gift- and that is this. A free teleclass with one of the nation's top sales trainers on how to sell more in 2008. Making maximum sales involves selling to more people, selling higher priced services or products, and selling more of them to the same people. Would you like to learn how?

The call will be held Tuesday, February 5, 2008 at 9pm Eastern. (Can't make it? Don't worry- I'll get the recording to you.) After completing the survey, you'll be asked to provide your email address if you'd like to attend the live teleclass or obtain the recording.

Here's the link to the survey again:

Tell me about your business…

Thanks for your time, and I look forward to hearing you on the call!

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Authority Summit 2007 is coming up!

Dr. Rachna D. Jain — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 15:15:53 +0000

The 2007 Authority Summit is coming up, with a whole line-up of well known online marketers. I've already bought my ticket and can't wait for the event. I attended last year and it was a really great experience, with lots of online marketing specific content. You know how you sometimes attend conferences and there isn't really anything you can immediately use? The Authority Summit is different. I, myself, applied just a few of the techniques I learned there and my site traffic increased more than 10x soon after, just on one website. If you've been floundering around the internet, looking for a well-designed, cohesive system to build your online presence, you will get a strong foundation at the Authority Summit internet marketing conference. This could be the missing piece in the puzzle of your online internet success. One of my most favorite people, Dave Lakhani, will be speaking there, as well as one of my other most favorite people, Jack Humphrey, and I'll have a bunch of friends and colleagues there as well. It would be great if you were one of them. If you're looking for a way to develop your online presence and generate traffic to your sites, look no further than the Authority Summit. You'll leave with a wealth of new ideas and a community of new friends. Here's the link to the Authority Summit Press Release if you'd like to learn more. I hope to meet you there! I'll be back tomorrow with a new article. See you then.

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