“Never build a business. Build a system.”

Charles Morgan

Do any of these pain points sound familiar in your business?

Your cash flow suffers from feast or famine syndrome – your busy periods can be insane, but you also suffer from dry spells or slow periods.
Your business is the best at what it does. The real challenge in your marketing has been getting enough people to realize that.
You’re concerned that if you raise prices, you'll lose customers because they don't recognize your real value.
Your marketing strategy to date has consisted mostly of trying new things and seeing what sticks. You have a sinking feeling you’re wasting a lot of money on marketing, but you don't know what else to do.
You're investing a lot of money in marketing, but it's been tough to know which marketing activities are the ones bringing the best leads.
You know you could increase revenue by 25-100% if you had a more significant sales force or more talented salespeople making more sales. However, you don't want to add extra overhead and have found it impossible to hire great salespeople.

Any of these situations sound familiar?

If they do, don’t worry. It just means your marketing is stuck – literally and metaphorically. Fortunately, there's a better and much more profitable way to run your company's marketing (as a well-oiled engine instead of a series of sporadic events cobbled together, Frankenstein marketing style).

I’ll explain why - and how.

As you already know, the world's largest and most profitable businesses all rely on systems to increase efficiency, deliver dependable results day in and day out, and increase profits. No doubt your business runs on systems too.

McDonald's is one of my favorite examples of being systems crazy – everything from the way an employee washes their hands to the ordering of cheese, lettuce, and tomato on your big mac are all systemized. Nothing is left to chance so that the costs and the profits are as predictable as possible.

You probably have systems for recruiting, training systems, quality control systems, systems for production?

So why wouldn't you also have a marketing system – a dependable, reliable, and measurable way to attract, convert, and retain new customers? Maybe you already do but you don't think of it as an actual system?

I call a marketing system a marketing engine because, just as with a car, a marketing engine is what drives the company forward. It’s also step 6 of The Client Stampede Formula®.

Arguably a marketing engine is a company's most critical system because no matter how exceptional a business might be, there is no business without customers.

So what does a marketing engine look like?

It's divided into three separate components or units that work together.

The first is the “Client Attraction Unit.” This unit comprises all the different lead generation tools used to attract prospects. It’s everything your company does to get the phone to ring or an inquiry form filled out. For example digital marketing campaigns, direct mail, podcast, webinars, linkedin, radio, TV, networking, public speaking, co-marketing etc.
The second unit is the “Client Conversion Unit”. It's the marketing tools and processes your company uses to turn a prospect into a paying customer. For example, digital sales presentations, one-on-one consults, the script your team uses when answering the phone and questions asked etc.
The third unit is the “Retention Unit”. This is the most overlooked component of any marketing engine, which is a pity because it's also the most profitable. An example of retention marketing tools might be themed client-only events held, a monthly mini-magazine, personalized email campaigns, etc.

Chances are excellent you already have some or all of these components at work in your company, but perhaps the marketing activities are siloed or not set up as an integrated system?

Or maybe the problem is that your overall marketing message is not resonating with your target markets. It might be old, outdated or in need of a transformation

(see the case study below).

A marketing engine's single most important goal is to ensure that every lead is captured and optimized. No lead is wasted. For example, what happens in your business if a prospect doesn't buy right away? Do they get deleted or forgotten about? Or do they get added to your marketing engine until they either buy or opt out?

Now let’s dive just a little deeper into your marketing and talk about the difference between your marketing engine and marketing gas. You'll soon see why this distinction is so crucial to your marketing budget – and how it affects the results you've been getting.

To recap, your marketing engine is your marketing system comprised of mostly evergreen marketing tools, sales systems, and procedures used repeatedly. The bigger your marketing engine, the more marketing tools you have in place, the faster your organization can grow.

However, for your marketing engine to run, it also needs marketing gas. This is the amount of marketing budget invested every month to keep your marketing engine running. Marketing gas is your disposable marketing cost typically paid to third-party media companies such as Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc.

For example, your website is a core part of your marketing engine. But the monthly cost of hiring a company to write blogs or SEO is marketing gas – a disposable monthly marketing cost as is the cost of hosting your website.

Similarly, a short, expertly written book to attract your dream prospects could work is an evergreen marketing tool that could form part of your lead generation or client conversion. However, the ad campaign you run on Facebook to promote the book, is marketing gas. It's a disposable marketing cost.

Here’s another example. A TV commercial or promotional video – the commercial/promo video itself is part of your marketing engine because it can be used over and over again in many different campaigns across many other advertising media. But the advertising costs paid to the TV network or Google/YouTube to air and promote is marketing gas.

Enough with the marketing theory. Let's talk about a case study of a marketing engine in action.

One of our clients was a family owned wealth management company started by the grandfather fifty years earlier. It was a third-generation owned business, and at its peak two years earlier, had reached $19M in annual revenue. But alarmingly, revenues had started declining.

The firm was run very efficiently, the financial advisors were well qualified and well trained. That wasn’t the problem.

For the most part, their existing client base was pretty satisfied. That wasn’t the problem either.

The reason for the declining revenues was two fold: one, their client base was aging out and dying (the clients' heirs were moving assets elsewhere), and two – the firm was struggling to find its place in the market and attract a steady stream of new, younger clients.

The firm's number one way of attracting new business had been by word of mouth referrals. They had had some success holding the traditional prospect lunch and dinners pre-pandemic. But their website was dated and generic-looking (largely the same as their competitors), and there was a lot of room for improvement with no real marketing system to speak of. The firm needed a marketing transformation. Designing and building their marketing engine was a six-month engagement, so I'll just give you the cliff notes of what we did.

How To Build a Marketing Engine

We started off by applying strategy first (as always). Using the Client Stampede Formula®, we identified three key target markets to specialize in. We created Irresistible Messaging and revamped their brand to be more modern and a more accurate reflection of who they were. When we were ready to start building their marketing engine – here's how it shaped up.

Client Attraction Unit: We started by designing a completely new website that included five lunch break books on topics near and dear to their dream clients' hearts. We included a follow-up email and postcard sequence once the books had been downloaded or requested – the goal being to share a virtual group lunch to discuss the current biggest trends in personal; finance (no icky sales pitch – just relationship building). We also created radio ads, magazine ads and a formalized referral campaign to name a few.

The Conversion Unit: We designed the format and content of the virtual lunches, created the slides to be shown, and implemented marketing campaigns to be sent to attendees both before and after the event. We also made FAQ scripts for the team answering the phones and email inquiries and redesigned the in-person meet and greet process to be more personalized and friendly.

The Retention System: One of the tools we created was a monthly printed mini-magazine for clients to keep them up to date on market changes. This was also turned into a series of client-only weekly webinars for clients to request guest tickets (so it worked double duty as a client attraction tool).

Their marketing system had a lot more tools than what I've outlined above, which I'm not going to share for client confidentiality reasons. There were 42 different attraction, conversion, and retention marketing tools in all. The great thing is that once the system was built and we ran it for the first few months to get it optimized, the client's own team could take over and run it with minimal involvement. Fourteen months later, the owners got an offer to sell they couldn't refuse. One of the biggest reasons the new owners were so interested was getting access to their client list - and their marketing system.

They couldn't figure out how they were doing what they were doing.

In Summary

Irrespective of the size of your business, now you can understand the power of a marketing engine.

It doesn't matter whether your marketing engine is the size of a Kia instead of a Ferrari.

The critical thing is that you start viewing all marketing investments through the eyes of a marketing system lens.

How is this activity driving our business forward?

Is this investment something that we can repeatedly use as part of our marketing engine?Or is this a disposable marketing cost (marketing gas)? Knowing the difference is everything!