The Untold Secret Behind Great Marketing - Adrian Fleming

the untold secret to successful marketing

My name’s Adrian Fleming and I’ve been involved in cross-media marketing for over 22 years and in that time…

…I’ve been introduced to many people that call themselves marketing experts and many who sell marketing services, even marketing training…

…but the reality is that there is something people, including most of those people get wrong more often than not and it’s got nothing to do with…

…what you do, how you do it, how much you spend or anything else that people normally talk about; I’ll explain more on that with you in a moment.

But before that I want to just set out a couple of points.

The first point is that marketers and businesses like to try and segment their marketing in to different areas, one way they do this is…

…by classifying it, so as print, TV, radio, online, mobile and so on.

Another form of segmentation is the terms B2B and B2C, so business-to-business or business to consumer, depending on the type of prospect you are selling to.

A third way marketing gets segmented is by splitting advertising, marketing, PR, trade shows and other promotional activities.

Then, after all these things you get push and pull marketing, or above and below the line, in industry jargon.

You see the marketing world seems to want to niche down as often as it can, so you end up with something like B2C mobile pull advertising, or…

B2B PR in the trade press and even from there people segment further.

But as an entrepreneur you live in a results based economy and so results are what matter and as such marketing is and should always be…

…any activity that compels a prospect to buy from you.

Marketing must have that purpose and as Strategic Coach founder Dan Sullivan puts it:

“Marketing is any activity that gets people intellectually engaged in a future result that's good for them and getting them to emotionally commit to take action to achieve that result.”

I don’t want you to segment out your marketing at all. I want you to look at the results and there is a secret to getting results that only really comes to light when you’re an entrepreneur.

You must operate your marketing across ALL, and I mean ALL, the influential people that move what you do from you to the end consumer, let me give you a personal example.

If you sell a product you need to make sure that everybody, and remember you always market to people not companies…

… that helps take what you do and offer in to the market is considered and marketed to, for example:

You may have designed a new product and that product is sold through specific wholesale distribution groups…

…so that’s where you traditionally focus your sales and marketing efforts, but this approach really limits your impact.

Some businesses are smarter and do some consumer advertising too, encouraging end buyers to look for the product…

…and maybe, just maybe, ask in store for it, which can encourage the store to want to buy it and request it from the wholesaler…

…who in turn has had that product marketed to it, so this uses what are called push and pull techniques in the marketing.

But this is still very, what I would call, naive when it comes to marketing.

You see when you have something to sell, you need to look at who buys it from you, maybe it’s not your product…

…so you also need to see who’s selling it to you and what they do too…

…but you need to make sure that everybody, from the buyer to the warehouse staff, to the shop floor staff, to the customer support people are all…

…“sold” on the product or service you provide.

You want each and every person who could come in to contact with your product or service to know about it and think to themselves…

…that if they were in the market for what you offer then you would be their supplier.

Think about it this way…

…if you are two or maybe even more steps away from the end user of your product or service, this adds massive risk…

…and this sort of risk doesn’t come with the upside of rewards, it’s all negative.

I’ve fallen victim to this myself on more than one occasion where one particular party in the process does a poor job even though their customers want something.

In fact in one particular personal example of this happening it was the advertising agencies that were doing a poor job for their clients…

…one of my businesses spoke to their clients who wanted something but the agencies didn’t want to do it for them because…

…it made them far more accountable and in this scenario they didn’t want to take the risk, if I was being cynical…

…being found out, our marketing just didn’t overcome their reservations and fears.

As a positive example tough I remember when we created a range of boxed Christmas Cards and not only got the product and price right for the UK market…

…but got the distribution and marketing spot on too, the result was going from nothing to container after container load of one boxed Christmas card product.

Demand was unbelievable, I think we ended up bringing in from China where we had this product produced more than 40 40ft shipping containers full.

That’s a lot of boxes of Christmas Cards and we dominated the UK market that year and the next before the competition could catch up.

And by then we had moved on with the next innovation. It was having everything right that made it a marketing and sales success, at every point.

But take a look at what you do; maybe it’s a product you can find in a clothing store, it doesn’t matter what it is you will get the idea…

…but if the end consumer doesn’t know your product is there they are less likely to buy it.

If the person serving on the shop floor is not a fan of your product they will not sell it as well or at all.

If the shop doesn’t sell your product very often they will not reorder it or buy other products you have.

If the people managing the fulfilment to the store find your product difficult to handle or…

…your systems are not helpful to them they will tell their buyers that they would rather not handle your product.

If the buyer at a wholesale or retail level is not seeing sales then no matter how good the pitch is to them, they just will not place orders.

You see marketing is more thorough than most people think and happens not just before people buy…

…but in the buying and selling process, even after that time too.

Simply put, the secret to marketing is making sure you are focused on results and the best way to minimise risk is to…

…make sure, as much as possible, that everybody who handles and can influence the sale of your product or service is on your side…

…making it as easy as possible for people to spend their money with you – something all entrepreneurs should be striving for.