Marketing can be quite a challenge for any services company.
Selling intangibles is not the same as selling concrete products that can be touched, tasted, or test driven.
While product marketers need to be concerned with packaging, branding, and focus group results, service marketers must figure out how to get prospects to buy the promise of quality, reliability, and results.
Any honest marketing professional will tell you that any marketing effort is pretty much educated guessing, where budget resources get bet like chips on a roulette table.
There is no such thing as a "sure thing" in marketing, in spite of the claims made by experts in the field.
It's all probabilities and odds.
Still, you have to show up and play.
But if you understand that marketing is really a gamble, you have skewed the odds of success more in your favor.
This knowledge will allow you to plan more carefully, see the results more pragmatically, and help you decide which program elements stay and which go based on results.
But wait...
I am assuming that you actually have a marketing program, and that may be inaccurate.
If your business is like most small to medium (and in fact, some quite large) enterprises, your marketing efforts may be stand alone initiatives with little or no relation to each other.
If this is the case, you are making things harder than they should be and are losing out on the cumulative benefits of having an integrated marketing program.
Many of our clients, all service companies, come to us with a specific request.
The request might be for a web site, a brochure, or a report of some kind.
While we are happy to provide these deliverables, we try to do so within the context of the client's larger marketing strategy.
Trouble is, more often than not there is no larger marketing strategy.
The request is more a reaction to a stimulus ("We need to update our web site," or "We need a brochure to send to prospects") than a part of a multi-faceted and integrated marketing approach.
I think that all of us can grasp the advantages of an integrated approach over a onesy-twosy, do-it-as-it-occurs-to-us way to conduct marketing.
An integrated approach increases the ability of individual marketing initiatives to contribute to and benefit from other initiatives, so that a "whole is greater than the sum of its parts" effect is achieved.
It can be much more cost-effective and can produce a much higher return on investment.
It can raise awareness and interest in the target market faster and more powerfully.
It can align closely with business objectives so that results are on track with company goals and mission.