Turning your marketing upside down: why you need to address your marketing counter-intuitively

If you want to increase your sales, the obvious answer is to tell more people about your product or service. Isn’t it?

Well actually, logically, that’s the last thing you should do.

As business owners, it’s almost instinctive: more sales has to come from more prospects, they come from more leads and they come from more enquiries. So that’s where I need to start.

And if all of your enquiries eventually convert into customers then, yes, that is all you’d need to do. But lets face it, our “sales funnels” are not really funnels. If only they were!

If you are spending money on promotion, but you are losing customers further down the buying process, then you are wasting money.

And if, like most businesses, you’ve got leaks at a number of different points in your funnel then where do you start?

You start at the bottom.

I know instinctively you’ll want to start at the top, but I urge you to resist it: if you spend money on promotion before you fix the gaps in your marketing, then that’s money wasted.

Plus, if you start from the bottom with your loyal customers (even if you only have a few customers) and you make sure they’re the happiest customers alive, then two things will happen:

1. They’ll buy more from you.
2. They’ll be happy to provide you with testimonials and case studies, and they’ll tell their friends, colleagues and associates about you, all of which will help you generate more business.

Books like The Brand Bucket by Barnaby Wynter and Watertight Marketing by Bryony Thomas advise starting at the bottom of the 'sales funnel' and fixing the gaps in your marketing from the bottom upwards.

​Addressing your marketing weaknesses in this order builds incrementally so that when you start spending money on generating leads, it will all be money well spent. You’ll also have a sound, robust marketing machine that pays back for your business.

If you want to find out how to do this in your business, drop me a tweet, an email or a phone call.

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This article contains ideas derived from the first edition of 'Watertight Marketing' by Bryony Thomas. It was written with permission and under licence during my time as a Certified Practitioner 2014-2019. The original intellectual property remains with Watertight Marketing Ltd. For more information visit watertightmarketing.com

Please note I am no longer part of the Watertight Marketing network and so I now use other methodologies instead of this one to achieve the same great results for my clients.