«When it comes to people remember that you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with emotional creatures» – Dale Carnagie
One of my current – and yet unresolved – business challenges, experiencing Inbound Marketing, that my colleagues and I face daily at Impactum, has been to encourage clients to implement new strategies. Some radically different from what they are used to doing and other strategies even simpler than they currently do.
In both situations it is just as frustrating and delicate to make the transition, on the one hand you understand the client’s fear of leaving behind what he is comfortable using, what has worked to a certain extent, what he understands and trusts. And on the other hand you know that it could improve, that the results with which it has been formed are extremely inefficient, that clinging to old methods is costing him a lot of money and if he does not change, it may cost him the future of his business, because what he does he refuses to adopt, others will receive him with open arms and in full swing.
In a competitive world, or reinvent yourself or you will be eaten by cheaper and more effective companies than you. It may even sound absurd to simply explain to someone what is best for him, to make him see that what worked yesterday will not necessarily work for him tomorrow with tests, and it does not help much to appeal to logic when the problem is more emotional.
I started working in Impactum (Digital Marketing Agency in SLP.) To learn and put into practice all there was to learn about digital marketing and business led by metrics and results. I was amazed by the new methodologies that allowed you to measure up to the last pixel (so to speak) and make changes in real time to improve and iterate processes. I was left open-mouthed to see everything you could know about a user, and I shuddered to see all the unidentifiable information that was used to sell the perfect service / product at the time and to the right person.
At first all this for me (with general knowledge in information technologies and web programming) was magic, simple and inexplicable. Little by little, the back doors of these magic tricks, the hidden gloves and the smoke screens, were revealed to me in all the magic of digital marketing. And the more I was allowed to see behind the curtain, the more I realized how much I lacked to learn and put into practice, if I wanted to start managing the whole process with the confidence and ease that my mentors demonstrated in Impactum.
I don’t believe myself an expert on the subject. Nor do I have an easy answer to this problem. I can not assure you that if you are reading this blog and you think «Hey, I really do not know what I’m doing» – he’s a guru and he’s on his way to doing great things. But, if I can bet that if for some reason you are reading these words and saying to yourself «Oh, I know all about this, nothing new» – and discards it; later I will return to investigate about it because I think Inbound Marketing is the future, I just hope it does not come back too late.
«If you keep doing what you have always done, you will continue to obtain what you have always obtained» – Anonymous
When I started looking for the best way to ensure and demonstrate with metrics and numbers, that our customers receive more than enough profits for each peso invested in the campaign. Something never before achieved in the area of traditional marketing, which is famous for having mixed results, because when it works, it works tremendously well and when not, you do not know why it did not work.
It is difficult, expensive, and highly subjective to try to quantify the effectiveness of a spectacular, radio spot, advertisement in a magazine. Said in the words of John Wanamaker, advocate of advertising, and pioneer of marketing – «Half of the money that I invest in advertising, is wasted and the other half works, the problem is that I do not know which half is which.»
We have two types of clients in Impactum, those who «understand» and those who do not want to understand but need it. The first ones love us, they literally welcome us with open arms and confidently hand over the reins of their business, trust us and our way of working, believe in Inbound Marketing and measure and quantify everything to improve. The second clients understand that they need a big change to generate the results that keep them afloat, and with effort and persistence on our part they manage to make the leap and end up very happy with the results.
And it is not to presume our agency and enlarge my colleagues, although the truth is what they love. But Inbound Marketing is a 360 change that generates tremendous results at a cost far below traditional methods. The comparison with radio spots, spectacular, and ads in magazines is like buying a postman on horseback with an email. They are not at all in the same league.