Read time: 4 mins
Morning — here's this week:
— What a blindfolded rugby player taught me about marketing
— Why "half our marketing works" is worse than it sounds
— One thing worth doing before Friday
What I've been up to
What I've been up to
Bristol Bears put on an activity day for sponsors and players at Mojo Active near Almondsbury. Archery, high wires, air rifles, axe throwing, building a fire, boiling an egg on it.
I should say up front that we won the axe throwing.
Two in the bullseye. I'm not going to pretend that isn't the highlight of my year so far.
Jake Woolmore — our man at the Bears, and the reason we were there — also beat Harry Thacker at building a fire and boiling an egg. Harry is the outdoorsy one. Jake enjoyed that a great deal.
But the bit I've been thinking about since was the four-by-four.
They blindfold the driver and stick them behind the wheel of a Land Rover on a course. Someone sits in the back and talks them round it. Jake drove. I directed.
And here's the thing I wasn't expecting.
He was driving perfectly well.
Every single time we went wrong, it was because of what I'd said. "Left a bit." How much is a bit, at what speed, for how long? He'd do exactly what I asked and end up somewhere neither of us wanted, and from inside that vehicle it must have felt like he was rubbish at it.
He wasn't. He just couldn't see what I could see, and I wasn't telling him well enough.
The problem: "Half our marketing works, I just don't know which half"
Everyone laughs when they say this one. It's an old line.
But sit with it for a second, because it's a genuinely alarming thing to be able to say about your own business.
It means you're spending money every month without knowing which of it is producing anything. It means when things get tight and you have to cut something, you're guessing. And it means when something is working, you don't know to do more of it.
Here's what I find when I actually look.
Most businesses can tell me what they spend. Very few can tell me what a lead costs them. Almost none can tell me what a customer costs them — which is the only number that actually matters, because leads don't pay invoices.
The gap is usually the same three things. Calls aren't tracked back to where they came from. Form fills go to an inbox and vanish. And the reporting that does exist is full of rankings and impressions, which tell you about visibility rather than money.
So the owner ends up like Jake. Doing a perfectly reasonable job, from inside the vehicle, with somebody outside going "left a bit."
The lesson
The lesson
You can't steer your way out of bad information.
That's the whole thing. If the picture you're working from is vague, then working harder on the steering doesn't help. You get better decisions by getting better information, not by trying harder with what you've got.
And the useful part is that this is usually the cheapest problem on the list to fix. It's not a new website. It's call tracking, working forms, and one number reported properly.
Most of what needs doing is a morning's work. It's just that nobody ever asks for it, because it isn't the exciting bit.
One thing worth doing
Ten minutes. Do it before Friday.
Answer these four questions from memory, without opening anything:
How many enquiries did you get last month?
Where did each of them come from?
What did you spend to get them?
How many turned into paying work?
If you can answer all four, you're in better shape than most, and you can ignore me this week.
If you can't answer two or more, you've found the thing that's costing you most — and it isn't your website, your ads or your prices. It's that you can't see what's happening.
That's fixable, and it's cheaper than everything else you were considering.
Prompt of the Week
This week's prompt: work out what you can and can't currently see about your own marketing, and what it would take to fix it.
P.S. Whenever it's useful, three ways I can help:
— Score your website in 2 minutes. We built it for trades, but it works for any service business that relies on enquiries. https://bamsh.co.uk/website-score
— Watch: what AI search means for your business. 12 minutes on where your next enquiries are actually going to come from. https://youtu.be/QXCk1NYG-Kc
— Stuck with your marketing? Book a 15-minute call, and we'll diagnose the problem and the opportunities. https://bamsh.co.uk/15-min