Marketing Metaphysics – Crystal voodoo mojo magic that grows your business

If I could quantify it in strictly physical-universe terms, I could get an honorary PhD at just about any university in the world.

What I do know is that it works. I have seen it occur more times than I can count. When our clients apply this principle they definitely see increases in their business.

What is this universal law? It is the very interesting phenomenon of where the act of promoting a business will increase the number of people who reach for your company’s products or services. Don’t say “duh” quite yet. The strange part is that often the people who become interested are not the people who received the promotional material.

According to the laws of direct response advertising, when you send promotion to a targeted group of people, a percentage of them respond. This is classic cause-and-effect thinking. It is the foundation upon which all business models for marketing are built.

So how can anyone explain that when you mail to a group of prospects, you may have no responses from them, but suddenly you get an increase in, say, the number of referrals?

It is like rolling a bowling ball down the lane, missing all your pins, but having a group of pins drop in the unoccupied ally next to yours. The act of rolling the bowling ball down the lane caused pins to drop. They just weren’t the pins you were expecting. In either case, you get the points.

Businesses who carefully track their results find that:

When you increase the volume of promotional activity, business activity will also rise. When you decrease the volume of promotional activity, business activity will slide.

Yet, it is quite weird that often the increase comes from somewhere other than where or what you were promoting.

A number of years ago, I had a major dental laboratory as a client. Dental labs and their technicians create crowns, bridges, or dentures for dentists’ patients.

If you were to walk into my client’s main work area, you would have seen a number of large shelves that held small, plastic trays. Each tray contained an impression and instructions from the dentist. At a glance, you could look down the shelves and have a pretty good idea of the amount of work in the lab.

About a week after we sent out a new direct mail piece, I stopped by the lab. As I walked in, I looked at the shelves and saw that they were full. Some trays were stacked two and three high in order to accommodate all the new work .

It was a sight to make any good marketing geek smile. Seeing it was like hitting the winning shot in a playoff game and seeing the crowd go wild. Except in this case, the wild crowd was a room full of production people with sweat coming off their brow. (Sometimes the production people don’t cheer when I walk in. Go figure.)

I found the lab owner and said, “Wow. That last promotion really pulled!” He shrugged and replied, “Not really. That piece was for selling denture relines. All of a sudden, we got flooded with work, but these jobs are all for crowns. So I guess the promotion wasn’t effective.”

Hmmm. Sales had been relatively flat for the previous six weeks. A promotional piece went out. Suddenly, the number of orders jumped. (Even though the orders were for another service.)

Well, that wave of work passed and the sales volume fell back to its previous level.

For the next two years, every time promotions were mailed, there was a rise in business. I tracked it very carefully. But the client couldn’t connect those two events because the increased service was often different than what was being promoted. It was too “illogical” for him to believe.

Would you water the tomatoes in your garden and expect to have your strawberries suddenly grow?

It’s common for business people to miss the connection completely. It is easy to do.

An associate of mine who provides printing services is a statistics master. She tracks not only her primary business functions, but all of the other activities that contribute to getting a final product out the door.

By carefully comparing trends and years of data, she conclusively shows that when the promotion activity is increased, there is a corresponding rise in the business volume. Every time she takes her foot off the gas and decreases her promotion activity, the business volume goes into a slide.

And yes, by applying this information and stepping up her level of promotion, she has her business growing despite all of the problems of being in a tough economy.

How does one explain this weird phenomenon? Voodoo? The metaphysical flow of energy in the universe?

Here’s what I decided a long time ago. It just doesn’t matter.

One doesn’t have to be able to explain things mathematically to see that they are true. You can simply apply what works and get a positive result.

So, how do you apply this in your business? Here are the key points:

1. Know that you can directly influence the amount of business that comes in by how much promotion you put out.

2. Always track your advertising results so you can improve the effectiveness of your efforts.

3. Know that sometimes results come from unexpected places. It can be hard to directly connect some increases to specific actions. But I assure you that cutting back on your promotional efforts will put things into a decline.

Don’t just believe me. Track your business volumes when you promote and see the results for yourself.

Have you experienced crystal voodoo mojo magic where you promoted one thing and got responses for another? Drop me an e-mail and share your experience.

Looking for assistance in getting your advertising producing bigger results? Give us a call and we’ll set up a no-obligation discussion to sort out your best plan of action. Call (800) 595-1288. I look forward to talking with you.

To your business success,

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