There’s a secret in the banking industry. Savings accounts with restrictions make people save more. A CD, or certificate of a deposit, is also a commitment device. Let me explain.
A president of a bank in the Philippines offered a few hundred of his customers a locked savings account, which means you could not make any withdrawals until you hit a certain savings limit or you hit a date milestone, say six months or a year out. The result was an 80% increase in savings over people without those kinds of accounts. So, the story here is a goal with patience equals success.
Deposit Assets into Savings
The same goes for you and your business. How can you see gains in your sales in your B2B business if you don’t create assets, have savings, and have goals and milestones to meet? Many businesses will create assets, meaning social media, blog posts, videos, those kinds of things. But without amplification of relationship marketing, they fall flat and often disappoint. That’s why companies keep changing their marketing strategies and/or companies they’re working with, in search of that magic pill or magic bullet of success that keeps alluding them. Today, I want to talk about a secret marketing formula that I’ve discovered.
The Secret Marketing Formula
Now, I know math is hard, but success is not. But we’re going to talk about that successful B2B marketing formula. The successful B2B marketing formula is this, S=(MxR)/a. Let me say that again, S equals M times R divided by A.
S is for success. The M, (or marketing), is where you create content that speaks to your perfect customers. Your numbers should be broken down this way, 100% of the people you communicate with should be made up of 45% current customers, 35% past customers, and 30% prospective customers. That’s where the A comes in. We’ll talk about that in a little bit.
So, success equals marketing times relationships. (That’s the R in the equation.) You need to build upon the relationships of you and your staff. This includes your salespeople, customer service people, and any other client-facing staff who need to connect with people online, either by using LinkedIn or email. By doing that and utilize the content that you’ve created, you will amplify your messages.
The content is posted on their behalf, so they don’t have to spend time finding it and posting it. But it’s up to them to engage and react to comments and messages from people who see the messages on their profiles or from their emails. Success equals marketing times relationships divided by advertising (and there’s your A.)
Divided By A
When I talk about advertising, it could be something simple and free like awareness graphics or basic posts. But it could also be paid advertising, meaning that it reaches not only your current customers but prospects as well. The concept of awareness graphics or posts is to increase the visibility of all of your content for all of your staff and the company. And it’s rewarded by the algorithms inside of social media enhancing the ability for people to see your content. In other words, the more consistently you post, the more social media will show those posts to people who know, like, and trust you.
Paid advertising helps augment that a little bit. It shouldn’t be very salesy. It should drive back to that asset content, that content that you’ve created to speak to your current and past customers. But if you pick up a handful of prospects in the process, that’s not so bad. To summarize again, success equals marketing, or content, times relationships, or customers, divided by advertising, or awareness. By utilizing this marketing formula, you can maximize the assets that you’ve created.
Patience & Investment
In order for this successful marketing formula to be exceptional, it takes two more things.
First, it takes time and patience. More often than not, it could take three months to design and set up a great system. You first have to look at the current activities and decipher what’s working, what’s not, and why. And then augment it with content creation that better serves your brand and customers. After that, you have to create the content. And then finally you have to implement it, meaning you have to get that messaging out to the right people.
Now it can take up to six months to break even. And what I consider a break-even is a three-to-one ROI, meaning you’re making three times what you’re spending. You need to make money for your business, you need to make money for the expenses, and you need to make a profit to reinvest. Once you get to that point, the system becomes self-perpetuating, but it’s not making a profit yet. It could take up to a year to see incredible results. But between six months to a year, you will see incremental sales leading to more profits in your business.
The next piece takes investment. And it’s not just a financial investment, it’s an investment in time to be engaged with the process. This does not necessarily mean spending more money. It can often mean spending less once you determine what’s working and what’s not working and maybe re-allocating those funds. More importantly, you have to invest in making sure that there’s some kind of tracking mechanism between what you’re posting, the content, and the people that are engaging with it, and how that translates to sales. That system is integrated into making sure that you can measure the ROI.
Finally, you need to create assets that can be deposited in your marketing bank. And those deposits can be used over and over and over again. Not only are they produced out to all of the people in your business that I mentioned before, sales, customer service, and so on, but they can be repurposed. They can be turned into other assets. They become a bank from which you can make deposits and use them to help create more business.
Final Thoughts
With that being said, this successful marketing formula is very much like a bank account. Now you don’t have to be the president of a bank in the Philippines to make it work. What you do have to do, though, is be willing to invest time and resources into creating assets or content that can be deposited in social media and email that speaks to your perfect customer. When you do, you can start to make withdrawals in the form of more sales.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas, or questions about this marketing formula.
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