What Marketing Do Your Customers Deserve?

Over the years, I’ve done a ton of consulting work. Advising and working with businesses of all sizes across all industries. Even today, I continue to do free strategy sessions every week with business owners. Giving them more clarity and helpful advice to improve marketing.

Everyone understands the importance of marketing. It fills your pipeline, it fills your cash register, and it fills your wallet.

What 99.9% of businesses don’t understand is the role marketing plays in the life of their customer. The reason for this is simple.

Marketing is considered an internal activity, just like accounting. You don’t charge clients when you create a P&L statement, or when you file your own taxes. That’s how marketing is treated, you do it internally for your business.

That’s the problem. You don’t do it for your business.

You’re not doing marketing for your business, you’re doing marketing TO your customers.

You must re-frame how you view marketing from an internal activity to an external service customer’s experience.

What does that actually mean?

Marketing Is a Service

Just like “car wash,” “deep tissue massage,” “tax preparation,” or “help desk software.” Even if you sell products, you still offer marketing as a service to your customers.

Customer experience does not begin at the moment of a sale, or at the moment of window shopping. Customer experience begins at the moment your brand becomes part of the conversation.

If you’re not familiar with customer experience (Wikipedia):

Customer experience (CX) is the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. This interaction includes a customer’s attraction, awareness, discovery, cultivation, advocacy and purchase and use of a service.

It encompasses the entire journey, for as long as they or you are alive.

This brings me back to my original point. Marketing is an experience that enters customers’ lives. Sometimes it’s forced on them (advertising), and sometimes it’s given to them (inbound).

The question is: Is your marketing as good as your service?

You pride yourself on the quality of your services, why would you let your customer’s initial interaction with your brand be shitty?

Your customers deserve the best. That’s why you stand by your services and products. Can you, in all honesty, stand by the quality of your marketing in the same way?

Consider this. If you ask your customers to rate your marketing, just like your business, what rating would it get?

Let me make this point clear!

If you know your services and products are of top-notch quality. If it is better than your competitor’s. Yet, you’re still not able to get the leads and sales you desire. The quality of your marketing is to blame.

Marketing is the first service your customers experience. This makes their first purchase repeat business.

Business owners will spend an incredible amount of time fulfilling services and perfecting their products. Yet, they won’t spend the same amount of time, effort, and budget on their marketing. Something that more people will experience than the service or product itself.

Think about it. If 1,000 people see your TV commercial, 100 will check out your business, and only 5 will buy. A typical business will spend most of its resources on an experience for 5 people. The rest get a terrible experience because you don’t value marketing as much as your services. So you end up getting 5, instead of 1,000 customers.

You must do marketing your customers deserve, not what you can afford. It doesn’t mean you must spend a million dollars on your marketing budget. You don’t have that.

What you do have is elbow grease that you can put to good use on meaningful marketing activities. Meaningful marketing goes 2 inches wide and 2 miles deep. When you chase shiny objects, or what I call Hail Mary marketing, you go 2 miles wide and 2 inches deep.

Quality marketing doesn’t require quantity.