Is your marketing working? One of the simplest ways to find out is to ask a few questions every time you talk to a prospect:  How did you find us?  Why did you call?

The answers may surprise you or give you important insight into what part of your marketing is really working. For example, recently Tamre wrote a blog post about craft beer brands.  It was a light-hearted look at a few beers. It was an easy post for her to write because she’s somewhat of a beer geek. As a marketing company, it was loosely connected to what we do.

It didn’t contain five lessons or three tips. It wasn’t optimized for some of our target keywords. It was just a nice post that we thought our readers would enjoy.

And they did. It was one of our most popular posts in the last month, generating a few comments and conversation on social platforms. All in all, a surprisingly successful post. But it got better.

A few days after the post ran, we got a phone call from a marketing manager in a company in Colorado.  He had stumbled across the post because he used to work in the craft beer industry.  He liked what he read so he stayed and looked around our website. A week later, he became a client. With all the marketing companies scattered between here and Boulder, Colorado, there is no way he would have become client if it hadn’t been for that blog post.

So are we going to start exploring the many dimensions of craft beer in the hopes of finding other clients in Boulder? Probably not.  But there were some  important lessons in this experience.

  1. Prospects will come to you from many different paths. Make sure you look good in all directions. If the one blog post hadn’t been supported by a robust sample page and interesting downloads, we might never have gotten the call.
  2. Not everything you do needs to be directly about you. We don’t do any marketing for beer companies. We don’t even work with other beverage companies. The post was like a casual conversation that encouraged people to want to learn more. If you are an air conditioning company, share information on remodeling. If you are a restaurant, share a recipe or a list of your favorite farmer’s markets. Sometimes the best opportunities come when you aren’t trying to sell.
  3. Write, write and write more. With new websites popping up all the time, having a steady stream of interesting  content is not optional.

And finally, be ready when the phone rings. The blog post opened the door, but it was the company he experienced when we picked up the phone that closed the sale.