Some people might take issue with Louis Gudema's new book, Bullseye Marketing: How to Grow Your Business Faster, because it seems so contrary to what many "bleeding edge" marketing strategists are recommending. Louis has conducted research on hundreds of B2B companies and discovered that the vast majority are barely marketing at all, much less exploring technologies like AI, voice search, and machine-learning.

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In Bullseye Marketing, Louis details a marketing strategy that places new importance on a company's existing marketing assets (and existing customers). I invited Louis to Marketing Smarts to talk about the book and to share the fundamentals of "Bullseye Marketing."

Here are just a few highlights from our conversation:

Bullseye marketing can help almost any company, but it works best for small to midsize businesses (02:40): "Bullseye marketing is really kind of contrarian, because things like social media an inbound get a lot of the attention, but, for a lot of companies, 'bullseye marketing' is a lot more useful.... You basically have three phases or stages that a company could use to build out and scale its marketing program. It's really geared for those companies that don't yet have really robust, big programs. Venture-backed software companies that have millions of dollars and really experienced marketing teams, they don't need bullseye marketing. They're kind of beyond it....but, from my experience, 80 or 90% of the business world isn't really doing much marketing, or [is doing] none at all, frankly."

You can assess the health of your marketing organization in five minutes or less (3:50): "I have a nine-point digital marketing scorecard, developed from my sales experience, so that I could look at what prospects were doing and get a sense of how sophisticated their marketing programs were. These nine points are things like 'do they have a marketing automation program? Are they developing much content? Are they using social media? Do they have a mobile-friendly website? Are they doing search advertising?' And either by looking at the tags on their site or what's happening with their blogs and social media channels, or using third-party tools, you can tell these things. It's really fast. I can score a company in maybe five minutes, and get a sense of where the gaps are in their marketing."

Most companies are doing almost no marketing (04:55): "I realized I was living in a bubble, working with some pretty sophisticated companies, a lot of tech companies...that knew all the bells and whistles and how to pull all the levers and really produce results. Then when I did this study of 351 B2B companies that were roughly $10M to 100M in revenue, what I found was, on that nine-point scale, the software companies scored a median of 7 out of 9, and all other industries combined—manufacturing, medical devices, professional services, and so forth—had a median of just 2 out of 9. So that means you're essentially doing nothing. They probably had Google Analytics on their website and randomly were doing something else.... [Yet,] if you're not doing digital marketing these days, you're not marketing."

Bullseye marketing focuses on existing marketing assets and current customers (07:45): "It's 5-25 times more expensive to close a new account than to keep and grow an existing account, That means that, if you do grow an existing account, it's much more profitable because you've spent much less for those additional dollars.

"Another example of a marketing asset that most companies don't take advantage of is their website and their website traffic. For most companies, 99.9% of Web visitors come and go and don't leave a trace, and the company has no idea who was there or what they want. And it's because their websites don't have any calls to action, they don't have any conversion opportunities. Companies need to take a much stronger tack on that. It's much easier to double the number of leads you're getting from existing Web traffic than it is to double the amount of Web traffic and get leads at your current rate. Sometimes ridiculously easy."

To learn more, visit LouisGudema.com or RevenueAssociates.biz, or follow Louis on Twitter: @LouisGudema. And be sure to pick up your copy of Bullseye Marketing: How to Grow Your Business Faster.

Louis and I talked about much more, so be sure to listen to the entire show, which you can do above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience. Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes or via RSS and never miss an episode!

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Music credit: Noam Weinstein.

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Published on August 2, 2018