The End of
Traditional Marketing

If you've ever worked with a traditional marketing company, you know what to expect...

1. Lots of questions about your target market
2. Lots of testing
3. Lots of "invoice creep" (where you keep getting billed for more and more incidentals)

Here's what's wrong with that...

1. You are NOT the best person to tell them about your target market! Although every traditional marketing company will tell you that you are, you most definitely are not. This is why so many marketing companies will blow through the budget, and afterwards, they'll blame YOU and say that the information you gave them at the start was flawed.
2. Testing is great! But testing is a tool that should be used to fine-tune a proven marketing campaign. Companies who test, and test, and test – are learning on your dollar.
3. I've sat in on dozens of marketing meetings where traditional marketing companies try to explain the additional expenses on their bills. There's a reason why the word "creep" means 'to nudge up' and at the same time describes a person who is taking advantage of you. Your numbers should be set at the start of the relationship, they should be clear and easy to understand, and they should NEVER be nudged up.

Many traditional marketing companies are basically teams of trial-and-error experts, which means they try all the different past marketing tactics that may have worked for other companies, instead of finding out what's working best today, then locating your typical buyers and driving them back to either your storefront, or your phone number, or your website ready to buy.

True marketing is all about studying your target audience, then creating an appealing message about you, your company or your product... and knowing how to position that message in front typical buyers exactly when those potential buyers are either researching a solution to their problem or when they're ready to buy.

The right marketing firm should ask you about your top 3+ competitors (the ones who are similar to you and who are growing quickly) because a few days of research can uncover exactly where those competitors are spending the majority of their marketing dollars, what they're doing that's working right now, and exactly what ads or media pieces they're running.

If you own or run a company, you should be monitoring your competitors ads on a regular basis. And there's dozens of ways to do that quickly and simply (for both online ads – like pay per click, pay per call, or online media buys... and offline ads – like radio, tv, or direct mail).

We use a custom built software to monitor competitors of our clients, but there are lots of tools you can use to get a glimpse to what the other side is doing, like:

• Google Alerts
• SpyFu
• Marketing Grader
• SEO Book
• Infinigraph
• SEM Rush
• Monitor Backlinks
• Compete

A little knowledge of your competition combined with real knowledge of your typical customers can be a game changer to any business of marketing campaign.

Traditional marketing operates on the assumption that you know your customer. You filled out a buyer persona document. You described their demographics. And then you handed that to an agency who built ads based on your description. The problem: your description was based on what you thought your customer was, not what they actually are. And most agencies never pushed back because their fee is tied to ad spend, not results.

The companies growing fastest right now obsessively study their customers instead of assuming they know them. We use a target demographic analysis — a detailed document built from actual research and real customer conversations — that tells every person on the team exactly who the customer is, what they fear, what they want, and what language they use to describe their own problem. When everyone on your team has that document and uses it, your marketing stops feeling like a guess and starts working like a system.

Marketing's only job is to get people to look at you. It was never the main driver of sales. What you do with that attention determines whether they buy. Most businesses blame marketing when conversion doesn't happen, but the problem is usually what comes after the marketing works — the message on the page doesn't match the promise in the ad, or the follow-up is weak, or the story isn't compelling enough to justify the next step.

The businesses winning today treat marketing as the beginning of a relationship, not a one-shot attempt at a sale. The goal of any marketing piece should be to start a conversation, build trust, and earn the right to make an offer later — not to close a cold stranger in 28 seconds. That shift in philosophy changes everything about how you allocate your marketing budget and how you measure success.

Great marketing tells a story your audience wants to repeat. When your message is compelling enough that a customer tells a friend about it unprompted, you've found the message that will scale your business. Every marketing strategy, every budget decision, every channel choice should be evaluated against that standard: is this creating the kind of connection that gets repeated? If not, no amount of spend will fix it.