Three Steps to Simpler and Better Marketing

A lot of CEOs of B2B businesses that I speak with, are suffering from a pretty common paradox. They look at their business and they see a lot of activities being put in play for marketing, but they don’t see the results. They’re not moving the needle. I want to share three steps you can take to simplify your marketing while at the same time make it more effective.

1-Do less

The first step is the obvious one, and that is do less. Reduce the number of marketing campaigns, tactics, projects, dashboards, platforms that you are trying to execute on at any one time. If you take a look at your business, you’re probably like most CEOs in that, they have their business has signed up for more campaigns and programs, then they can actually deliver on, and their team is overwhelmed and they’re not able to focus on what it is that they are trying to accomplish. So what’s happening is, while the number of programs is high, the number of programs that are actually delivering results is often less than half of the programs in play.

2-Do it really well

Which brings us to the second important step, and that is, once you’ve reduced the number of campaigns that you’re focused on, I’d recommend two or three strategic ones to start. Do them really well. Execute, follow through, finish. Do whatever it takes, have the right amount of resources to deliver the impact that you have decided you wanted to achieve with that program in the first place. So many companies don’t do this. They start something when they’re real excited about it, and they often stop it before it’s complete.

3-Measure

And the third important step is measure your results. Wrap up, understand, did it work? How did it work? What could they do different to make it better? Should they stop doing it next time? Should they double down and do more of it? Does it lead to an important next campaign to add that will do even more than what they did in that first one? This measurement step, closing the loop, will allow you to get full leverage from the investment you made in those key programs that simplified your marketing.

Do less, do it better, and measure your results. Do that, close that loop, iterate, and I believe you will find that your marketing is doing more for you with less effort.