Start at the end

Scouts Talent provides on-demand finance and accounting consulting for clients on a project basis. The company works with CFOs, controllers and business finance leaders to help them reach business goals.

When they do a great job, the company will, on occasion, seek a social media post or other form of validation to help with marketing efforts, says Partner Gwen Martin.

“Having somebody else talk about us in a great way is more powerful than me telling you my company is great,” she says. “If somebody tells you ‘You’ve got to go try this restaurant, it was so awesome,’ you’re going to take that with a lot more weight than if the restaurant is out there saying ‘Hey, we’re new, come and try us.’”

Scouts Talent tries a variety of strategies to get its messaging out and to become known as thought leaders in its field, including publishing five-minute interviews and five-second infographics that are informational and free to readers. The company started doing those a few years ago and they’ve built a significant following.

“These are examples of things that don’t really have anything to do with accounting and finance consulting, but it differentiates us and we’re sharing knowledge, we’re out there as the experts,” Martin says.

She acknowledges it can be difficult to figure out exactly why people call or specifically why business increases. It could be a social media post, a referral or an email that finally clicks and gives Scouts Talent that “‘Wow, these guys are everywhere,’” type of feel, Martin says. But trying more things versus fewer has proven beneficial.

“Any one of those dots independently wouldn’t have been able to move the needle,” she says. “It’s important to try a variety of things and have the buzz out.”

Get the story straight

One piece that has really helped is having a laser-sharp focus on what the brand and its differentiators are, Martin says. That might not sound hard, but distilling it down really can be tricky. For help with that, Scouts Talent has worked with Garrio Harrison, a partner at Curious. With inflation in effect and money tightening, his company has been connecting with clients recently to ensure marketing dollars are being spent wisely. That means that while they’ll have clients do the basics — Google’s Pay Per Click, social media, email marketing — just doing them alone isn’t enough.

“All these tools out there, when you add them all up, together your marketing budget is now pretty unmanageable,” he says, adding that “everything is happening at the awareness level of the process. You’re building up all this awareness, measuring based on awareness … that’s all passive, sitting back and waiting until people find you. You can go out of business waiting for that to happen.”

By talking to customers that have actually purchased from those clients in the past about how they found and decided to buy, Harrison says Curious helps them determine where their clients’ marketing dollars are best spent.

“We’re also making sure the sales team has everything they need to continue to nurture potential customers to their sales pipeline,” he adds.

Curious starts, Harrison says, by finding out the client’s story, learning about its differentiation, monitoring every stage of the sales process and targeting marketing efforts to the ideal customer. That allows the company to narrow its clients’ focus to a smaller audience made up of those who are more likely to purchase.

“The costs of getting in front of folks are getting more and more expensive,” he says. “Where we see folks struggle and where dollars are being wasted is they don’t spend time getting that key message right first.”

Start at the end

That process of establishing a plan upfront and using goals established in the process for measuring the success of a marketing effort resonates with Casey Fuerst, owner of Tic Tac Toe Marketing.

Where measuring marketing effectiveness used to be as simple as using coupon codes, now it’s harder than ever, she says, to measure marketing effectiveness. 

“It takes so many more points of contact than ever before to get somebody’s attention and to make a sale with marketing,” she says. “It’s hard to know which point of contact made the difference. Was it the billboard that finally made the sale or was it the email they got three times before that and the billboard just reminded them to make the call? It’s so hard to tell which gets the credit for the sale.”

So, instead, begin with the end in mind. 

“When somebody says I need to know the [return on investment] of every piece of marketing it kind of makes me cringe,” she says. “It’s hard to do and it’s naïve to be able to say we have to be able to do that.”

That’s not to say it’s not worth trying. Good planning upfront does help give a sense for whether an individual marketing strategy is working. But if, for example, a small business coaching company with two existing clients wants to increase that count over the next year, it might do some content marketing — blogging, emailing, social media. Those steps alone put out goodwill and raise awareness, but they don’t often directly lead to direct sales. They might, however, spark a starter conversation about how the company could help them. And, at the end of the year, if the company has eight clients, it’s a win, regardless of the specific tactic that made the sale.

“You might logically draw a conclusion that says, ‘Because I did content marketing, I went from two clients to eight,’ and so you could say ‘I can measure the results of my content marketing,’” Fuerst says. “But you probably wouldn’t be able to say, ‘This one blog post got me that extra six clients.’ It’s very hard to put measurements on specific tactics. But you might be able to draw conclusion about overall planning results.”

Now, that’s not to say companies should discount individual tactics. It is important to measure them and adjust course when necessary. But whether it’s content marketing, putting up billboards or sending emails, Fuerst says there has to be a plan in mind with a goal to reach and tactics aligned toward getting there or measuring is going to be impossible.

“We can throw spaghetti on the wall all day long, we can do random acts of marketing all day long, but unless we have a goal in mind and know where we’re going, none of it’s going to make a difference,” she says.

Creating an ecosystem

Kristin Wiersma, owner and chief consultant with Focus Consulting, had worked with Fuerst in a number of roles when she started her own organizational and management consulting company.

She’s been a consultant for two national firms but launched on her own in January. Fuerst, she says, has helped her boil down for potential clients her story while getting her to listen more about what that potential client might need without preconceived assumptions.

Tic Tac Toe Marketing also has helped create “an ecosystem of marketing activity,” focusing on not investing everything in one or two huge marketing activities but in really getting the word out about her offerings in multiple ways. And, Wiersma says, it’s been a clear story, consistent across channels, that communicates offerings without assuming she knows what clients are going to need.

“They’re going to connect with you on one and somebody else is going to connect with you on another,” Wiersma says. “They need to have the mutuality in terms of messaging. You can’t have different messages in different places. They need to lead to each other.”

Someone may find you on LinkedIn, go to your website, find an email list, read a blog or hear you at a conference, she says. 

“All those messages add up and they’re consistent, and so then they go oh, this person can be trusted,” she says. “Because in my world, it’s about creating a sense that I can be trusted to solve their problem.”

What is the goal

Heather Boschke, owner of Vogel Venture, did corporate marketing for large companies like Verizon, Radisson and ShopNBC, before a stint with a small nonprofit unlocked an itch to help small businesses. She agrees that measurement starts with having a goal, but she does pay considerable attention to the performance of different metrics related to those all-encompassing goals.

“It all starts with what is the goal,” she says. “What are you trying to achieve.”

Some clients might be focusing on brand awareness. For them, relevant metrics include Google Analytics measurements of traffic, both in general and on specific pages, and on how many people are going to your website, what percentage are opening emails and on your social media reach scores. Public relations might be another focus with these companies, so she’d look at whether content from the client’s website was being picked up for stories or how many hits are coming from articles written about the company.

For a company seeking greater engagement, on the other hand, Boschke says she’d look at liking, sharing and commenting on social posts or whether targets are clicking into emails.

And still other companies are looking to increase revenue and sales. Relevant measures for them might be cost of acquisition, basket size at checkout or revenue per customer.

“What I do with my clients is I create a marketing scorecard based on their goals,” she says.

While those are tactics that can be measured, Boschke does say it still starts with the initial goal.

“That’s 100 percent it,” she says. “When I do my strategy sessions with my clients, it’s the same thing. What are we trying to achieve? Are you trying to increase brand awareness? Are you trying to introduce a new product? From there, how are we going to do that.”

Once those goals are in place, companies can implement traceable tactics, implement them, measure them and tweak along the way based on results. Boschke emphasized that getting to the goal isn’t going to happen overnight.

“Give things time,” she says. “There’s no marketing faucet that spits out leads and revenue. If that was the case, that would have been found already. Marketing is the long game. It’s showing up and being consistent. Understand that long game and be willing to put in the work.”