Marketing doesn’t stop when the customer says yes

Marketing is often judged by what happens before someone becomes a customer.

How many leads did we generate? How much traffic came to the website? How many enquiries converted? What did it cost us to acquire them?

All useful things to understand.

But if we're interested in whether marketing is genuinely helping the business grow, we need to look beyond the point of sale.

Because winning the customer is only part of the job.

Marketing makes promises

Your positioning, website, campaigns, sales conversations and proposals all help prospective customers form an impression of what it will be like to do business with you.

They create expectations.

If you're promising expertise, responsiveness, quality or a premium service, the customer quite reasonably expects to experience those things once they've signed on the dotted line.

And that's where marketing can run into problems that aren't actually within the marketing department.

The campaign might have worked perfectly. The right prospect came through the door and sales converted them.

But if the onboarding is painful, communication disappears, delivery doesn't match what was promised or the customer encounters frustrating systems and processes, that original marketing investment starts to unravel.

The customer doesn't see departments

Internally, you might have marketing, sales, operations, customer service and finance.

Your customer sees one business.

They don't particularly care which department owns the problem when something goes wrong. They simply know that the experience they're having doesn't match the one they thought they'd bought.

That's why looking at marketing in isolation can be misleading.

If leads aren't converting, customers aren't staying or referrals aren't happening, it is tempting to conclude that marketing needs fixing.

Sometimes it does.

But sometimes you need to follow the customer through the business and find out what happens next.

Existing customers are part of your marketing too

Growth isn't only about attracting new customers.

Customers who stay, buy more, use other services and recommend you to other people can be enormously valuable to a business.

And those recommendations matter because somebody putting your name forward is also putting a little of their own reputation on the line. They need to be confident you'll deliver.

That confidence isn't created by a marketing campaign.

It's earned by the experience of working with you.

Look beyond the marketing department

If marketing isn't delivering the results you expected, don't automatically assume the answer is another campaign, a new website or more leads.

Look at the whole picture.

Is the proposition right? Are you attracting the right customers? What happens when sales picks up the opportunity? Is it easy to buy? Does delivery match the promise? Do customers stay? Do they buy more? Do they recommend you?

Marketing has an important part to play in all of that.

But it can't do it alone.

If you're questioning whether your marketing is really helping the business move forward, let's have a conversation.