The Problem of Marketing
Marketing is one of the hardest things to get your arms around in business, especially if you're a results-oriented measurement freak like I am. As the famous saying goes, "Half of all marketing is wasted. The problem is you never know which half."
(I've seen this quote in several forms, and variously attributed, so we'll just call it business folklore)
There are many problems with measuring marketing, especially when you're promoting a business-to-business service like ours:
It can take a long time before a prospective customer actually picks up the phone and calls us. By that time, there may have been many marketing impressions, and there's no way to know which were most effective.
If a prospective customer visits our web site but doesn't call, you don't know if that was a lost sale (bad) or information-gathering for the future (possibly good).
There are a large number of variables which go into any marketing campaign: medium, message, audience, etc. If a campaign succeeds or fails, we don't always know which of those elements was right or wrong.
There are a lot of companies which provide various marketing services, none of which want to provide data which might prove that their service doesn't work.
When trying to allocate very scarce resources in a startup, deciding to spend money on a particular marketing effort is hard. There's always the question of, "will this money be well-spent," since you don't want to pour it down a hole. On the other hand, when you do spend the money, if there's nothing to show for it, there's never any certainty as to why.
For example, the one thing we know for sure works well for us is exhibiting at trade shows. The problem is that (a) trade shows don't happen all that often (3-4 times a year for the shows which are effective for us); and (b) they're expensive, and the show promoters generally can't be trusted to provide an accurate forecast of what the traffic will be like.
Targeted direct mail, on the other hand, can be inexpensive and incremental, but (for us at least) it doesn't work. We're not sure if that's because (a) nobody reads junk mail anymore--at least, not the decision makers we need to reach; (b) we haven't successfully boiled down our message into something which works in this medium; or (c) the lists we've used weren't as high quality as we were led to believe. After having an unsuccessful marketing campaign, there's always the temptation to tweak some small thing and try again ("Maybe if we bought a different list!" or "Maybe if we sent a color postcard instead of a letter!"), but that way lies madness. Or if not madness, territory best explored by those with much larger budgets.
One tool which we've found very useful for measuring the "buzz factor" in getting our name out is Google. For a nickel a click we can buy our name on AdWords, Google's keyword advertising program. The value is that Google tells us not just the number of clicks we get, but the number of impressions, too. So, for a few bucks a month, we get a daily report (which now goes back over a year) of how many people searched for our company name each day. Sharp spikes correspond to our trade show exhibits, with a background level telling us how often people are just thinking of us.
And then there's the scams and near-scams. Every six months or so, we get a call from a fast-talking salesperson offering us a spot in an exclusive event/publication/whatever which will reach only the most important decision makers among our customers. Names of big companies are dropped. Promises of quick sales, entry into new markets. And all we need to do is cut a check for $15,000 or so by next week to reserve our slot.
But, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, I don't want to advertise anywhere that's too desperate for my marketing dollars. There is no silver bullet of marketing, but plenty of people are happy to sell you one.