It’s well known that 30 minutes of vigorous exercise five-plus days a week has terrific health benefits. And yet only about 20% of Americans do this.
Similarly, robust marketing programs can have dramatic impacts on a company’s revenue growth. My own study of software companies found that those with broad marketing programs grew about five times faster than those without them. Studies in many other industries have produced similar or greater results.
And yet most companies seriously under-invest in marketing. Again, my study of 351 B2B companies with 50-1000 employees found that while software companies are aggressive marketers, companies in all other industries usually are not. Eighty percent or more of these non-software companies do very little marketing.
Some coaches work on helping world class athletes lower their time by another 1/100th of a second. And that’s fine. But the big opportunity for impacting people and society is getting the 80% of people who aren’t exercising to do so.
And there are marketers, especially those working with large companies with mature marketing programs, who are looking at how to produce constant, incremental improvements. I saw a piece recently from the Boston Consulting Group about how they could improve the sales generated by a large-scale TV campaign by 4% by re-allocating the ad buy. If I was spending tens of millions of dollars on TV ads, I would want that. But few companies are.
My focus, and the audience for Bullseye Marketing (the approach and book) is those 80-plus percent of companies that don’t yet have mature, effective marketing programs in place. That’s where the biggest opportunity is to move the needle and make a transformative difference.
