We all market our businesses with a single clear end-result in mind – we want more sales. Brand awareness is great, building credibility is fantastic, however ultimately at the end of the line there’s got to be money in the bank otherwise we’re all filing for bankruptcy.

However so many business owners employ a “hit and hope” approach to marketing, almost with the expectation that their efforts will fail to a larger degree than they’ll succeed.

It’s somewhat expected that direct mail campaigns will only have a success rate of 5-10%; that email marketing campaigns will only be read by 10-20% of people; and that if 40% of the people visiting your website leave  just as quickly as they got there it’s performing well.

The expectation for success in marketing is minimal, yet accepted.  This makes sense, when you think about it – imagine if you sent out an email campaign to 10,000 people, and every single one of them decided they wanted to buy from you – would you actually be able to handle those levels of business?  I know for a fact that I wouldn’t; and unless you have a team of hundreds of people or a warehouse filled to the brim of stock then the chances are you wouldn’t either.

The chances of that happening are slim, but that scenario does underpin the irony of marketing – in most cases we need it to fail more than it succeeds, and we’re happy throwing money and resources at this pursuit of failure.

This highlights an opportunity, and in many ways a need, to market smarter – to focus on smaller, targeted marketing activities, where the likelihood of success is greater, and the implications of that success aren’t too much to handle.  Many already do this – highly targeted search campaigns, email marketing and telesales – but are you doing enough to raise the success rate to a manageable level?

Is it better to “convert” 5% of an audience of 10,000, or 50% of an audience of 1,000?  It’s less about increasing the amount of customers, and more about eliminating the waste – or the expected failure rate – that is involved in getting those customers.

It’s just something to think about and hopefully steer you towards more focused, targeted marketing.  I believe we all take for granted that 95% of people ignoring our marketing efforts is an acceptable loss, so it’s good to challenge those ideas every now and then.

As always I’d love to read any thoughts on the matter – have you any examples of “hit and hope” marketing you’ve done in the past?  Has there every been an occasion where the success of a marketing campaign has caught you unaware?  Or do you think a “spray and pray” approach is the best or only one we have?  Thoughts, comments and questions below!