Timing is Everything in Marketing & Scaling

Today, I want to lean into the tagline of our newsletter a bit — A Day in the Life of a Growth Marketer.

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve had multiple conversations with both clients and business owners I support in a mastermind I coach in.

I’ve also actively been running my own campaigns for clients.

One theme that’s consistently come up in talking about both marketing campaigns and scaling discussions is this…

Timing is everything.

When you’re creating a new marketing campaign, yes, the offer matters a lot and how you deliver the message matters…

But getting the right message at the right time is critical.

Let me give you an example…

The Difference Between a Flop and a Walk-Off Homer

I had a new promotion that flopped this week.

It hurts to admit that, but I also don’t know a single marketer, salesperson, or copywriter with a 100% win rate.

Losses happen in business and it’s how you respond that matters.

The last time a campaign for this product was run it absolutely crushed it, delivering one of the highest conversion rates the company has ever seen for a $12,000 product.

This time, the conversion rate is much less than half.

It was a surprise to me — I modeled the type of promotion, the offer was almost identical, and the team felt good about the angle.

But the results tell a different story. So, it’s time to dig deeper.

The only thing I can definitively say at the moment is last campaign, we really dialed in “right message, right time.”

Specifically, we leaned heavily into the AI angles that were taking the marketing world by storm and we showed how our customers could take massive advantage of them for business growth.

It’s a hot topic they were actively thinking about with an AI-based solution to the problems they were experiencing at the moment.

Right message, right time = huge conversions.

This is why it’s so important to go through the exercise of reviewing your customer avatar before every campaign…

Because what your prospects were actively thinking or worrying about 3-6 months ago may or may not be the same.

Here’s how to do that:

• Review Your Customer Avatar: Look at the demographics, psychographics, behaviors, current pain points, current interests. Has ANYTHING changed?

• Review the Current Market Environment: Are your prospects seeing, hearing or encountering anything different that could impact the message you share with them in your next campaign?

• Review Your Competitors: What promotions are your competitors running? Do you have any data or insights as to how their current messaging is working for them? (If you don’t know, one way to tell is if they are cutting promotions short, pivoting in their marketing angles midstream, or extending their campaigns and doubling-down.

• Review Your Most Successful Campaigns: Especially after a disappointing campaign, it’s good now and then to go back and refresh your memory on your most successful campaign vs the one that just disappointed. Can you identify what you did well in the last one? Or is there simply an indication you did a better job at “right message, right time”?

As marketers, leaders and founders, it’s easy sometimes to get caught up in everything else going on.

But from time to time, we need to remember to get back to basics and make sure we’re always putting the right message at the right time in front of our prospects.

The same is true for right strategy, right time…

I’m Stuck at [Insert Your Level Here]… What Do I Do Next?

Ok, first thing… I did NOT forget to insert a level into a placeholder there - that was intentional.

But if you’re a founder or a marketing exec currently looking to scale to the next level, I want you to insert your metric there.

For example:

• I’m stuck at $5M per year… what do I do to get to $10M?

• I’m stuck at 5,000 SaaS subscribers… what do I do to get to 25,000 and then to 100,000?

• I’m stuck at a 10% profit margin… what do I do to get to 15% without adversely affecting my business?

Scaling is all about applying the right strategies at the right time.

The actions you take to scale a business from $1M to $5M are typically different than those need to get from $5M to $10M or from $10M to $50M.

This is a much longer discussion with a lot of finer points, so it’s one we’ll be diving into over a series of issues.

Stay tuned.

Jon and Chris