Bombs Gone Wrong (Part 1)

On Tuesday, I wrote about marketing tactics, using the metaphors "farms" for slow growth long-term tactics, and "bombs" for short-term high-impact lead generation tactics.

I love the smell of marketing in the morning.

A bomb tactic will generate a lot of leads or attention or revenue, but the impact is very short-term. This would include promotions, events, sales, grand openings, coupons, sweepstakes, giveaways - anything that makes a big noise but has very little ongoing effect after the fact.

Setting off a marketing bomb is awesome and fun, but done poorly, it can be very bad news.  Setting one off the wrong way can at best waste your money, and at worst, damage your business (sometimes irrevocably).

Here's some examples of bombs going wrong.

Follow-Up Failure

You bought a booth at that big, well-attended, high-visibility expo.  You gave out a tons of stuff, collected a lot of leads, talked to a lot of great people, and got a lot of attention.  You just really had an awesome show...

... and then you just dropped the ball, as you did not plan time and process after the event to follow up and close with the leads.  Eventually, you might have gotten around to it weeks or months later, but by that time, it's no use, the "halo" of your event is now gone and those leads are now stone cold.

I'd bet this is the number one mistake we make with this kind of tactic - the lack of adequate follow-up.

When you set off a marketing bomb like an event, you MUST have a follow-up plan in place.  If you have to do it yourself, clear time in your schedule and put a process in place.

If you don't follow up, don't waste your time and money with the event.

Coupon Collapse

Or let's say you decide to send coupons out to drive business during a specific period.  Awesome, you have a huge uptick in leads, trials or sales during the coupon redemption period.

The coupon equivalent of the unmarked bill.

You didn't have in place a way to measure redemptions associated to sales nor did you plan out time after the redemption period to do this analysis.  So you're not really sure, objectively, what your margin erosion on sales associated to those coupons was nor what lift you may have had vs. a non-coupon redemption period.

Also, you decided to saturate the community with these coupons - and now, you've given away tons of margin without any way to follow up with the individuals who redeemed the coupons.

You've got to track what any tactic does for you!  You've got to have a way to follow up with customers!  Without that, you are just giving money away.

I'll continue expounding on this in Part 2 on Tuesday.

Need help with the issues I bring up here?  That's right up my alley!  Let me help - contact me today or leave a comment below!