An important aspect to planning a marketing campaign is the product’s sales cycle. If you have something that works with a call to action, in other words with a short sales cycle, then advertising is usually the best way to get business. But if your sales cycle is long, anywhere from 6 months to a year or two, then you have to look for other forms of marketing. Advertising isn’t going to do it for you.
One of our clients, IFTI, Independent Floor Testing and Inspection, has to live in both worlds.
Two marketing tracks—We’ve identified that there are two different stories that have to be told. One of the stories, the Emergency, when there is floor damage, has a direct call to action attached to it. They can run ads regularly for relief from the water damage emergency. The ad may not be for everybody reading the magazine or getting the email, and there is rarely a situation where an ad is for everybody. But when people need it, the ad is there telling them what to do. That’s the best kind of advertising, by the way, call-to-action advertising.
Their other track is Preventative, letting building owners know that if they test in advance, they can protect themselves from the expense of repairing after the damage has been done. In that case, there is no call to action.
An important thing to remember is that no one has a budget big enough to do a successful advertising campaign when there’s no call to action So, it’s really difficult to get any response from ads. There are better types of marketing for that, including PR, web sites with SEO, conferences. In other words, you have to build up an environment for a campaign that isn’t based on a direct call to action
The sales cycle for the Preventative message is a long one. Marketing for a campaign with a long sales cycle has to be carefully planned. You identify the prospects. You decide what the plan is going to be– how many phone calls, emails, case studies, conferences, etc. that you will do and in what order and in what frequency. Then you and your team systematically run the plan. Occasionally you get lucky and a prospect gets it and hires you quickly. I insist that you celebrate! But, that doesn’t change the plan for all the other prospects. It’s a real sales cycle. You have to go through each step with a certain percentage of prospects.
