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Never assume What is “Success.”
Hi I’m Brian Pombo welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live. Coming to you live every day today from Grants Pass, Oregon.
I apologize for the last few episodes we’ve had been having technical difficulties broadcasting out and have some little glitches. We’re trying to work it out.
Hopefully everything works out better today.
And I want to talk about assuming and what it does, especially when it happens to do with marketing.
So I’m going to give you a concept, a very specific concept, and then bring it out to a very broad principle. What we’re going to cover goes straight into some tactical things here.
I got this postcard, larger postcard in the mail. Merry Christmas from one of the local churches.
I’ve never been to this church. I don’t know anything about them. This is a River Valley Church that meets at Lincoln Savage Middle School over on New Hope Road, and says, Christmas Eve in Murphy.
Now, oftentimes people will show me a piece like this. Sometimes, in fact, one of the most common things I could ask for is my opinion on the usefulness of a particular political mailer, which is a little bit more, but in terms of what they’re trying to achieve.
I like this version because it’s like, what was the point of this mailer?
And you should never assume you know what their concept of success is based on what they wanted to do with it is how I would grade this. I wouldn’t just grade it on a very basic sense of marketing because I can use a million different things that I would improve or not improve on.
But it all depends on what you’re wanting the end user to do what you’re expected to get out of it. Now perhaps them sending this out to everybody.
This was at every door. Yeah. This wasn’t every door a piece of direct mail. So that means it gets sent out. It’s blanketed out there.
It isn’t specifically sent to any one person.
There’s not even an address name on it. It doesn’t even say, the current occupant or anything of that sort. It’s just a local postal customer.
So with that, when you’re buying a piece of mail like this and oftentimes you’ll see this with a postcards, you see a piece of mail that gets sent to everybody.
This is something they call, every door direct mail. It’s done by the post office has been for a number of years now. And it’s an inexpensive way to be able to just blanket something out if you’re trying to get within a specific radius.
So you can just hit the postal routes and so forth that you’re looking to get.
Not just the zip code, but down to the postal routes. So it’s a pretty, pretty interesting, that’s an interesting tactic if you’re understanding anything about direct mail.
But the other thing is, as it says, Merry Christmas from your neighbors at River Valley Church Murphy. So they’re giving you a little bit of a feel good on one side.
On the other side it says, please join us for our second annual Christmas. Even Murphy’s not far from here.
We’re in Grant’s Pass technically, but Murphy’s right down the road, a Christmas carols nativity scene, refreshments, a message of hope, 5:00 PM on December 24th Lincoln Savage Middle School with the address.
Find out more about who we are. Visit us online RiverValleycc.org/murphy campus about the only thing you can see in terms of a call to action. If we were to guess what the point of this is, the people out to this specific Christmas Eve celebration on Christmas Eve night.
And then, they’re looking to get you to go to their website and they’re looking to make you feel good.
Even if you don’t know anything about them. And this is the first time I realized that River Valley, it is a well known church in town, but I didn’t realize they had a Murphy campus. So that’s my first realization of that.
So it’s a little bit of branding advertising there.
It’s very glossy. It’s very nice, nice feel to it. But the real issue is, is what was the point of it?
If the point was just to make me feel good and to put the bug in my brain of who River Valley Church Murphy was, it did okay on that. I know to most people they’d probably see this and they toss them and they don’t think twice about it.
So those are always tough when you’re looking do any for branding, it’s very difficult to judge whether it worked or not. So that’s one thing you got to keep in mind. Another thing is, is what was the end goal?
Are they looking to see how many strangers show up to this date on this particular time?
That’s something that they can track. That’s something they’ll be able to see and there’ll be like, see whether it worked or not.
I don’t know how wide an area they went over for this. This isn’t that far from us. So it could have been a very targeted area so they should get a good idea of who’s new and who’s coming as long as they’re there checking with people at the door and then they can always look at their website and see if there has been any new people popping in. Any bump in visitors to the website.
So there’s a couple of ways they can judge whether this was worth the money worth the time.
The fact that it’s a nonprofit you tend to see, especially a local nonprofit, you tend to see them not be as detailed with that type of thing.
But when they are, if you run a nonprofit, if you run anything of that sort, then it is something to keep in mind is really being targeted with what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, everything else.
But the bigger picture idea here I want you to think about is don’t get caught up in trying to judge things from an outside perspective because I don’t know, in the end I don’t really know what their point was.
I don’t know what success is for them and oftentimes in our businesses it’s real easy to look at everybody else, including our competitors and say, wow, they’re doing really good.
Look at all the ads that are run running there or look at what they’re doing over here. We should copy that. You don’t know if they’re actually being successful with what they’re doing.
Just because they’ve launched that new product, whether that product’s doing any good, you can’t really tell in even over years and years of time whether they’re doing the right thing because you don’t know what qualifies as success.
Now, if you had inside information that the more you have, the more of a concrete idea you can have and then like for example, if they said, the main thing we want to do is drive people to this website.
I’d say there were many ways that they could have put more attention toward that and less attention towards anything else and they’d be able to up how many people show up to the website.
There’s also ways they could have gotten more people to show up on Christmas Eve.
They could have been made this a whole lot more specific and you really do have to sit here and read through it in order to get the main message and because it’s directing you a couple of different ways, I don’t think it does as well at bringing into mind those calls to action, but see that’s all dependent on what they wanted as success for this.
If they may very well be a success for them. So that’s a simple idea, very much a principle, but it’s core to what I look at when I’m looking at a business.
I can’t look at the outside and tell you whether it’s working or not. I have to know where you’re looking to take things, what the purpose is of your tactics before I can know whether those tactics worked or not.
So hopefully that’s helpful to you.
If you’d like me to be able to look at your business, go to BrianJPombo.com. I’d be happy to be able to take a look at your business.
We’ve got a couple of different options there. Includes strategy sessions starting at $600 and above.
If you happen to be in the self-reliance field and you’re interested in the same type of deal, meaning you’ve got products and services that help people to become more self-reliant, then go to DreamBizChat.com that link is in the description. You can go check that out.
There’s a free video there and you can, you can get kind of a deeper idea of what I mean by a strategy session or a Dream Business Transformation.
Hey, I will have another video for you tomorrow. Hopefully have a couple more.
I’m going to have to put some extra videos one of these days, to make up for a day we missed a couple of days ago. So you have a great night. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.