How To Troubleshoot A Marketing Campaign Even If It’s Your First Time
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Welcome to public sector lead generation. My name is Dimitry and in this session, we’re going to learn, “How do you troubleshoot a marketing campaign?” It could be the first one. Maybe it’s something that you’re taking over, somebody shifted roles and now you are inheriting somebody else’s marketing campaign or it’s a new thing that you are starting. This is going to be valuable to you if you are trying to get leads, trying to communicate with either the federal government, state and local government, healthcare, or nonprofit organization. So let’s dive in now.
Analyzing Your Campaign Performance
How do you troubleshoot a public sector digital marketing campaign? You will probably have two. There are only two situations that you could have. You either are not getting any leads or you are getting leads. So, we’re going to look into both cases. So, if you have leads but have no sales, then the disconnect is likely either in the marketing message or the sales process itself. When those gig leads get called on or whoever closes them, they either don’t understand the product benefits, right? They’re trying to push it on them, or the lead is not qualified enough. So, there’s either disconnected messaging or on the sales side. To solve that, you can download the six steps for maximum conversion—the L.A.R.A.C.S checklist.
Now, if you don’t have a delete, don’t despair. So first of all, marketing is one of those fields that is a numbers game. For the most part, 80% of your result will not produce anything, right? So only 20% of your campaign, one out of five will produce some result. It does not mean it is going to be profitable, but it will produce some results. So your job is to identify what’s the 20% that’s working right away and eliminate the others. And ideally what’s happening is you’re drilling for oil. Basically, when the oil companies or the gold mine companies, they’re looking for new profitable locations, they drill. Let’s say 100 oils because one or two of those oils will outperform the other 98. So don’t give up. After one or two or three marketing campaigns that didn’t work out, do not despair. You could be 95% there and it’s like boiling water. You could be at 200 degrees, right? 205 degrees. You need a little bit more to get to that boiling point.
How we Troubleshoot Over the Years
Let me show you what we figured out over the years and hopefully this will be valuable to you. What do you think about past performance? If you have some in the past, let’s say you spent $10,000, you maybe got zero leads, you got some leads. Let’s just see. It is important to understand, is it working? Is it not working, what is the situation?
So, was there a spend date? Any results, any time frame? For example, you spent $10,000. You got zero leads in six months or in five minutes, or in ten days. Then, you can divide. Let’s say you got one deal, you got $10,000. Deal. You spent $10,000. What is the ROI? It’s one-to-one. It is not really profitable, but it’s a starting point. So, if you have had sales in the past that means it’s not a new product. Or maybe it is a new product, but you already have sales.
3 Golden Questions to Ask your Existing Customers
You have paying customers, but you are struggling to get the leads, the new customers do not come in again, there is disconnected messaging. What you want to do is go to your existing customers and ask them three questions. And these are the golden questions:
- Number one, what was the trigger for them to start looking for the solution? In other words, it’s not that we like them, they helped us out, but what specifically was the trigger that kicked them over the edge to start looking? Okay, we need to figure this out, right? We need to solve this problem.
- Question number two is, what was the outcome? Right now, they selected you out of competition, maybe not. Maybe, you got a warm referral. But now that they worked with you again, you don’t want to hear something like, “Oh, John was great, we enjoyed it, he was on time. Phenomenal company to work with.” That does not tell me anything. If I’m a new customer, you want a specific problem, solution, and type of outcome. You want a transformation. You had no leads? Now, you’re going to have leads or double the leads, or triple the leads, right? So, before and after asking them what kicked them, why did they start looking for the solution or solving that problem? That makes you understand which mind state they’re in.
- And number three, is there anything that was missing in the process? Or what would they improve? And that tells you, first of all, the first two give you the path before and after, and the third one helps you innovate. Maybe you missed something. Maybe they give you an idea that you don’t even think about.
Planning the Next Step for your Campaign
Now, how do you plan your next step? Let’s say you have a basic understanding of your offer. And let me just give you an idea here. Ideally, you want to communicate to one person with one offer and one action step. What I see happens a lot is you come to a landing page or the home page of the website, and there are seven different products. There’s 40 calls to action, 20 downloadable, a sign in letter, and a giveaway. And so basically, 27 decisions to be made. And, what happens is your prospect is getting overwhelmed and they’re not going to do anything. They’re just going to check out and leave.
If you have a busy landing page or website, go to your analytics, see what’s the average stay time on your site. If you see a high bounce rate, basically they come in 10 seconds, 50 seconds, and they’re out. You have a problem there. Ideally, you want to have a dedicated landing page with one where you communicate to one buyer. Whoever that person is, you’re giving them one offer and there’s one thing for them to do, don’t give them. Either call me or download this or watch this video or go fill out this application, right? It’s four decisions again. If I have one decision, it is yes or no, right? It is complexity level one. If I have two decisions, which one? I need to know yes or no for both of them. And if you have three or four decisions, it just multiplies geometrically and you don’t want to do that.
You’re overwhelming the person. So what would be an idea here? Let’s say you have an outcome they want, you have a mechanism and you have a call to action. So just to give you an idea, if, let’s say you were selling into hospitals and you have an application that maybe analyzes the route of nurses, right? They do a lot of walking to the hospital and the app is looking at their schedule and makes recommendations saying, “Hey, tomorrow instead of walking this path, you could be doing this, this and this.” Basically they’re saving time, avoiding burnout. It’s good for the hospital. Now, you don’t want to say our app is the best app or number one app. Do not start messaging with you because nobody cares. Your customers find you, they see you as an obstacle, and they want an outcome.
What’s the outcome in this case? Let’s say get actionable productivity insights in your pocket, right? If I’m a nurse and I have a phone, on the app, save 20 minutes today by going this route and clicking this. Whatever the solution is, as a nurse, I’m interested in that. Saving 5 hours a day and avoiding burnout, “Okay, I’m in”. And call to action, download applications for free. You could say learn more, but that’s just a lazy way to say, I couldn’t say what the next step is. “Just figure it out.” You don’t want to do that. You want to call them to value or action with a direct benefit to them. So, download the application.
In this case, now that you have the outcome they want, you have the mechanism. How do you achieve that mechanism, basically? And what’s the call to action? That’s the first value proposition that you need to lead with. And I would recommend running first. You want to run a test. Whatever your budget is, it could be $1,000, $10,000. I’ve seen budgets even higher than that. But what you want to do is run a managed test. Whether you have an email channel or not, I don’t know if you have an email list. You can send an email to your audience saying do you want to save 5 hours a week and avoid burnout nurses like question mark, now they’re going to open, now they’re going to come in, start to your free trial. Here’s some benefits that nurses are getting. See, which one you could split the test. Let’s say you have a 1000 people list. You want to do a B split test. Send one email with one subject line to half the list and another subject line to another half the list. Let’s say if you’re testing two hypotheses or two ideas for a subject line.
But ideally, again, keep it simple. One call to action, one subject line, one email. If you don’t have an email list and paid ads, spend $100 or $50 or $1,000 a week, a day, whatever your budget allows to drive some traffic and to try to sell it. Even if you didn’t build the thing yet, that’s even better. So see if they’re buying it, if they download, if they click buy now enter the details, you can say hey it’s in production, we’ll get back to you right away. But that gives you real data saying hey people want this. But if nobody clicks it, nobody downloads it and you build the thing, guess what, you just wasted all this time and now you need to figure out what’s not working. So figuring out the messaging part first is ideal for you. That’s going to make your job very easy. If you have any sponsors, any joint ventures. So somebody who has a list, maybe it’s a joint service. So again, if you’re in healthcare and this could be maybe an accounting firm that has a list, right? But they’re working with hospitals a lot so you can say hey let’s join forces.
I’ll advertise in your newsletter saying hey we’re going to help nurses, et cetera. You’re basically tapping into somebody else’s channel for a quick test and see again, did it convert? Did something happen? The fourth option is events. You can go get a booth, print a few flyers and see if there are takers. If people want your thing right, it’s the validation. It’s not thinking in your mind oh of course they’re going to want it. No, you want to show it to them and then, see if they actually give you the money. Or they want an RFP, they want proof of concept, they want to see something. Basically you want the first step and now you want to measure, right? So, this is the part where everybody’s afraid. What are the numbers? So, typically, let me just give you an idea in ecommerce, so out of 100 people that come to your website, if two or three of them buy so two or 3%, that’s considered good. That’s e-commerce.
B2B Lead Generation
Now, in government or in business, B2B. Typically, the response rates are lower because it’s more difficult, right? It’s not a $50 pair of headphones that I’m buying. This is a $50,000 application. Potentially, the buying cycles are longer and the conversion rates are different. So, I have seen conversion rates anywhere from 0.2% in the public sector going up to 13 and 16%, which is very high. But that’s in different sectors.
So, if you’re dealing with, let’s say, security or ransomware protection, something that protects the foundation, the structure, the security systems of a business, that’s survival to them. So, those type of products will typically sell high, sell faster, because you need that to run the business. And so, depending on where you are but basically if you have a 1% rate in the public sector, that’s considered good. You could be having again 10%. But if you have anything less than 0.2 so 20 people out of 1000 are not becoming your leads, you have a problem, right? So again, it’s either with the messaging or the vehicle. We can double click into that, ideally. Why are we doing all this? Everybody wants a systematized, basically a customer acquisition formula.
Conclusion
Let’s say in business, a lot of times the leadership will raise money. And, when they come to raise money, the investors, all they want to see is they say, “Hey, let’s say we give you now $20 million, a million dollars and $100 million. How are you going to use that money?” And what they want to hear is typically customer acquisition. If we spend $1,000, we get how many dollars back? Is that one customer? Is it two customers? And so, let’s say you end up getting 1000 visits either to your website or maybe clicks on your email, 1000 interactions, 1000 watches of the video, or 200 watches. Out of the thousand clicks, let’s say 1000 people come to your website, 200 click and watch the video. Out of them, 30 booked a demo. Out of the 30, you got five sales. And what is your customer value? In the public sector, it ranges hugely. So it could be 5000 per customer, it could be half a million or more per customer. So what’s your customer value?
If you close one sale right now, how much is that per year? And do they typically stay one year or two years? Let’s say if it’s a federal contract, you could be getting that for five years. And if it’s 50,000 per year, that’s $250,000 per customer, right? So, five sales at 250, that’s 1.25 million. Now you’re saying, “All right, so we got 1000 visits and we got 1.25 million. So, instead of five sales, if we need 25 sales, we’re just five X. So, we need 5000 visits. If we need 50, then we get 10,000 visits, et cetera. And this is your acquisition formula. Now, basically it’s just the number. It’s a game of budget. How much budget do you have? Now, you know it costs you, let’s say, $500 or $1,000 to acquire one customer, all right? Let’s spend 100,000 to acquire 100 customers. So, once you have that number, that formula, this is the control in your business. So whatever you need, just ten X to spend or five X to spend. But you need to figure out what is that first formula? So, try to get 100 visits, 100 clicks, 100 interactions, and from that you can draw conclusions. Feel free to comment on any questions. You can get in touch for more or to book a consultation. If you’re running something and it’s not working, book a consultation with us.
