SIX SIMPLE THINGS YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW TO MAKE MORE MONEY FROM YOUR MARKETING

#1 Review Your Marketing Program, Scrutinize Results

• yellow pages ads
• flyers, brochures
• business proposals
• newsletters and other publications
• public relations activities, etc.

The next thing you'll need to list is WHAT HAPPENED; that is, who responded and what happened then. Did you get a client? What did the client do? How much money did you make? How much did you lose?

By now you're probably groaning. You're trying to tell me you don't have all this information; that the details aren't readily available; that no one kept them in the first place; that you're not even sure what you did in the first place.

My friend, out of this chaos comes your new, improved, leaner, meaner, more effective marketing program! Now it's time to do two things:

• scrutinize the data you've got and make what deductions you can. Did you, for instance, spend $2,000 producing a newsletter but cannot track any discernible results? Here's a candidate for the chopping block. Did you find that your yellow pages ad in one book brought in clients and income but that you ran no similar ad in another directory covering another part of your service area? Again, the scrutiny will suggest a productive course of action.
• resolve to list all your marketing activities, their cost, frequency, and results.

#2 Maximize What's Effective, Cut Out What's Not

Take one of my clients, for instance, a community health organization. They launched a program to telephone area physicians' offices to increase their physician referrals.

After calling 100 local physicians and tracking results, they were able to see that this systematic contact, with immediate written follow-up, was profitable. Deduction?

Given the fact that this 100 physicians represented less than 10% of the physicians in their service area, the obvious deduction was to increase the program and reap further benefit.

Note: one knucklehead in the organization didn't agree. Even though she was forced to admit that the program was making money, she opposed any enhanced version of the program. Why? "Because we have such a good program, I'm sure that the docs and their assistants will hear about what we're doing and find their own way to us. We can save all this money!" If life were fair, we could boil this nit-wit in her own limited brain fluids. But it isn't... and so we have to ridicule her here instead, anonymously!

One sad insight I've come to after many, many years working with personnel in both the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors is just how many people are averse to productive systemizing. This just doesn't make sense. Everyone... whatever kind of business you're in... has to spend time discussing the profit-making process. That is, discovering those processes that predictably return money on a regular basis. Warning: real marketers are process fanatics. This is why they are constantly at work tinkering with every marketing gambit to find out whether it's working, how well it's working, whether it can be improved... or whether it should be junked. In the final analysis, marketers firmly understand that you can only achieve the most exalted results by adhering to the most rigorously productive systems... and they're willing to do everything that's necessary to both gather and analysis the date to ensure this result.

#3 After You See What's Working, Plot Out Rigorous Means For Improving It, Enhancing Results

But how?

Once you know what's working, it's not time to hare off after something entirely new, untried, experimental and, let it be stressed, risky. It's time to maximize the good results and make them better. This means brainstorming productive options. In the illustration above, the following marketing extensions make sense:

• expanding the systematic calling program to another significant segment of local physicians so that they and their staffs begin referring clients. This expansion could well be handled in steps so that in, say, one year every currently non-referring physician could be contacted by phone;
• following up all physicians and office assistants so contacted with appropriate (that is "client-centered") marketing communications, communications rich in client benefits, not marketer features.
• developing appropriate computer systems so that all information about the physicians and their office assistants (including name, address, phone, fax, medical specialties, special needs, etc.) are systematically logged and immediately accessible.
• developing appropriate in-house systems for training those who make the calls to the physicians offices, including how to open conversations, glean useful information, record and store it, etc.

#4 Doing What's Necessary When Your Scrutiny Shows You A Marketing Activity That Doesn't Work

Although a conservative man myself, I tell you this: tradition, things done just because "we've always done them this way", and all the other hollow catch-phrases used by vacant "marketers" thereby indicating that they don't know their trade, are entirely inappropriate in a productive marketing program. That's why you must institute an internal "sunset review process" for every marketing activity you engage in... and be rigorous about weeding out what doesn't work anymore, no matter how long you've done it!

#5 Change The Focus Of All Your Marketing Communications

• your organization name first
• your logo on the front cover
• a line telling the reader what you want (instead of what he gets)
• an opening paragraph about how long you've been in business followed by some self-serving puffery about your 'quality' services, your 'talented' personnel, or any other words that are about you... and not about the person who you want to take action!

They are, whatever your intentions, self-glorifying, pompous, packed with pretentious diction and one unauthenticated assertion after another, laced with jargon and condemned by "me-centered" myopia. Yet you dare to think you are a cool hand in the marketing department! Right now, your entire marketing program could be splendidly improved by basing everything you produce on these four magnificent words YOU GET BENEFIT NOW!

The "you" would remind you at all times that the only important person in the marketing equation is the person you're talking to, the prospect, the client, the customer, the patient, however you name this crucial being. You, as marketer, only count to the extent you do what's necessary to motivate another human being to take faster action. In all other ways, you're completely unessential!

The word "get" is there to tell you that people want something from you. They want to get, have, enjoy, profit from, experience -- and all the other verbs indicating an enhanced situation. Your job is to be the agent who transfers the bettering thing from yourself to the recipient.

The word "benefit" reminds you that this bettering thing, this benefit is what marketing is all about. Your prospects, your clients want to be comparatively better off after being touched, served, assisted, helped by you. They don't want to know who you are or how long you've been in business... or the fact that you can spin out your John Hancock with a dazzling array of alphabet characters after your name. They want to know what BENEFIT they'll be getting from you. And they want to know about it in all the often lurid description you can manage.

Finally, the word NOW! should remind you of when your prospect wants the motivating benefit you've fashioned for him. Americans have always been a restless, pushing, joke- cracking, ego-busting, what-have-you-done-for-me-lately kind of people. We want things and we want them NOW! That's why I always write the word in capital letters and increase its force with an insistent exclamation point. In business, you should be doing EVERYTHING POSSIBLE to motivate people today... and you should feel ashamed of yourself if you turn out ads, flyers, cover letters, brochures, proposals and all the rest of your marketing communications with doing what you can to stimulate ACTION NOW.

Is this all you need to know about improving your expensive marketing communications? Of course not! But just these four words will help immensely.

They'll force you to reorient not only your marketing communications but entirely rewire your brain. You'll be forced to be client-centered, you'll be forced to give up wasteful "me-centered" thinking. You'll be forced to think about whether the words you're using, the graphics you've employed, the colors and layout will either help motivate your clientele... or whether they should be jettisoned as merely pleasing to you, the person who counts for the least in the marketing you do!

#6: Get Yourself A Laser Printer, Cut Your Toner Cartridge Costs -- And Put The Money You Save Into More Client- Centered Marketing Gambits

Personally, I use a Hewlett Packard Laser Jet III -- and absolutely love it. It has cut down on the amount of time required to print all my marketing communications... and has vastly increased the aesthetic quality over the old dot matrix. However, laser printers, although not expensive, do cost more than dot matrix printer. Don't be penny wise and pound foolish here! Laser printers will cost you only a couple of hundred dollars more and save you lots of time as well as increase the quality. You can get a Hewlett Packard Laser Jet.
Note: one way you can save even more money is cutting the cost of your toner cartridges. You'll want to get yours where I get mine: Advanced Laser Products, P.O. Box 1534, Brookline, MA 02146 (617) 278-4344.
They have the lowest prices I've found. The quality is consistently high and the page output superior. Moreover, because of the extremely high quality of toner in these cartridges, your printer's drum can last up to twice as long -- which is a big savings to you! And since you'll be regularly saving a ton of money on each cartridge you use, you can invest at least part of the savings in hitting all your prospects and customers with more client-centered, motivating marketing communications. Yup, that makes sense: save money on your toner, and invest at least some of the difference in hitting those prospects again with the kinds of motivating communications that get them to act now!

Conclusion

• determine not to waste another cent of your organization's limited marketing resources;
• commit to do what's necessary to find out what's working -- and make it work even better -- and what's not working, kicking that out altogether;
• do what's necessary to focus on your prospects and clients and do what's necessary to motivate them to contact you and benefit from what you've got for them, and
• stay supple, flexible and, at all times, client-centered -- to challenge the mindless status quo and embrace sensible reform, and
• use every way you can to reduce office expenses (as with my suggestion on how to save money every time you purchase a laser toner cartridge) and reinvest the money you've saved in more client-centered marketing.