Perhaps the most exasperating, and frustrating marketing “fail” occurs when you forget to ensure that your marketing leads receive the right level of attention and responsiveness.
If marketing’s objective is to build enough awareness to attract an initial call/inquiry (and if done right, be “warmed up” sufficiently that the caller enters the relationship with a positive outlook and expectation about your business), what happens when you fail to return the call? Or, if the response doesn’t match the expectations — the inquiry turns into a high-pressure sales pitch, or some sort of autoresponding mechanism where the individual questions and needs falter under the?system’s weight.
It may seem obvious, but sometimes we forget the weakest link becomes in many cases the key bottleneck and barrier to marketing and business development success — and if you don’t fix it, you will pour good marketing money after truly bad results.
(I fear in our own business we are experiencing some of these challenges this week, for a good underlying reason — some key employees and contractors are taking vacations. However, in a fail on our part, we didn’t plan our coverage well enough so projects and responses are falling through the cracks or receiving less-than-perfect responses. We will make changes.)
Advice for today: Take a good look at your systems and processes and watch out for the gaps. Before you add more marketing initiatives to the process, be sure to see what happens when the leads arrive. And if you add new marketing processes, take some time in reviewing the back-end as well.
You can share your?requests or observations by email to buckshon@constructionmarketingideas.com or as a comment.
