Derek Champagne on BLS, part 2

Derek Champagne, owner of The Artist Evolution and author of the Best Selling book, Don’t Buy a Duck, takes the guesswork out of marketing by sharing 5 common crisis points to avoid in advertising your brand. Read part 1 here. 

Listen to the full podcast here.

[Derek]: Welcome back to the business leadership series. Before the break we talked about identifying yourself, about identifying your target customers, and about having a relatable message to them.

So I want to talk just for a minute about your marketing tools.

Often times we see campaigns where tools that are being used, the website, the print materials the social media.

Maybe these are not a proper representation of how the brand wants to present themselves.

Maybe the tools are outdated or not effective and this actually hinders a campaign. We strongly recommend when we go in and do an audit that we don’t want to recreate the tools if they are working, but if the tools are not effective for appropriately getting your message across and representing how your brand wants to be perceived then they need to be adjusted.

It does not do a whole lot of good to do a massive external campaign to drive traffic to a website that, once they get to the website, the bounce rate is high.

In other words, they get there and they leave after a few seconds because the website just isn’t effective in communicating with them.

You want your marketing tools – when you finally have the chance to engage with your target, you are in front of them, and you have cut through the clutter with your message and they are looking at your brand – to look at the brand and associate it with you.

You don’t want them to have any reason to say no. They need to have the opportunity to say yes quickly if they are a good fit.

So you want to make sure you are holding their hand once they start engaging with your brand and your marketing tools help lead them through to the next step, which might be a sale or a consult just depending on what type of service or product you have.

So one of the last two things that I want to talk about that we see as part of the five mistakes to avoid when growing your business is to have an integrated marketing plan.

This is a written marketing plan. Not the kind that you necessarily take to the bank to get a loan. This document is built for being a roadmap and for being an execution guide for your team.

This will be an integrated marketing plan that shows all of your cohesive messaging and also breaks your targets down by segmentation with their unique communication needs.

They will have a step by step implementation guide and a calendar that shows: here are the action items that need to happen daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, seasonally, quarterly, and annually to your business and will it be your road map to help you meet your objectives.

This document is going to start by saying “here are the objectives that we need to meet for our business”, whether it be open new locations or expand with a new ecommerce platform or a dollar number top line revenue growth.

Whatever it might be, this is the document that is going to work backwards from those objectives. Then, you start to plug in what the best advertising and marketing outlets and strategies are going to be.

This is going to be your go-to guide for your team to look at and this can be a three to five-year map for you.

So, we have talked about identifying yourself, identifying your target customers, developing your relatable message, having an integrated marketing plan, and the final crisis point that we see commonly where an advertising marketing campaign will get derailed, and this one sounds simple, is failure in execution.

Execution seems to be a challenge for many companies. We will go and do an audit and we will say, “Well how did this work?” and they’ll say,  “Well we started doing it and we stopped”.

You want to have a number one on your marketing calendar who is responsible for making sure that execution does not fail and, when done consistently, you start to make first downs.

We preach first downs in our business. When we continue to make first downs, that’s when we get farther down the field until we make a touchdown towards our objectives.

So execution is critical.

So those are the five mistakes to avoid when growing your business, and we have seen this save three, four, five years of guesswork from startups when they do it right from the beginning.

So we do preach preventative medicine, but the good news is it is not too late to adjust any of these five crisis points if your business is dealing with them now.

In my new book, Don’t Buy a Duck, I provide a detailed roadmap for each of these crisis points that we talked about today.

Please visit www.dontbuyaduck.com if you want to learn more. We also provide several free marketing resource tools such as this business leadership series, a free marketing calendar, and some other good tools for helping launch and manage the execution part of your marketing campaign.

Thank you for joining me today and I look forward to talking with you again in the next business leadership series interview.