Let’s say I invite you over for dinner.
I have spent the entire afternoon preparing what I am convinced will be the greatest lasagna ever created. I researched recipes, bought expensive ingredients, made the sauce from scratch, and even used the good Parmesan instead of that suspicious green can hiding in the back of the refrigerator.
You arrive, take one bite, and quietly reach for your water. Naturally, I explain that you are wrong. I tell you how much work went into the lasagna, describe the quality of the ingredients, walk you through my cooking process, and point out that three other people in the kitchen thought it smelled fantastic.
Unfortunately, none of that changes the fact that the lasagna tastes terrible.
At some point, I have to accept an uncomfortable reality: my opinion of the lasagna does not matter nearly as much as yours. Marketing works the same way.
Clayton Makepeace, one of the great direct-response copywriters, had a wonderfully unforgiving way of looking at copy. What mattered was not whether the writer thought it was brilliant, the client loved it, or everyone around the conference table thought it sounded fantastic.
What mattered was whether people responded.
You Don’t Get to Grade Your Own Marketing
I have sat through plenty of conversations where everyone has an opinion about a piece of marketing. Someone loves the headline, someone hates it, someone thinks the photograph should be bigger, and someone inevitably wants the logo bigger, which is a request that has probably kept graphic designers awake at night since the invention of the logo.
There is nothing wrong with challenging creative work before it reaches the market. The problem begins when we mistake our preferences for evidence.
You may love a headline that your customers ignore. You may think an advertisement is too long while your prospects happily read every word. You may believe an offer cheapens the brand while customers finally see the reason they needed to respond.
Until real prospects see the marketing, we are making educated guesses. Experience, research, and customer knowledge can make those guesses considerably better, but the market still gets the final vote.
“I Would Never Respond to That” Can Be Dangerous
Whenever someone reviewing marketing says, “I would never respond to that,” I want to ask a follow-up question: Are you the customer?
A 63-year-old business owner preparing to sell a company does not necessarily think like the 28-year-old marketing coordinator reviewing the advertisement. A mother researching orthodontic treatment does not necessarily think like the dentist approving the landing page, and a homeowner whose roof started leaking during a thunderstorm is in a very different state of mind from someone comfortably discussing whether the headline feels too dramatic.
We naturally judge marketing through our own experiences and preferences, but we are usually not selling to ourselves.
Your prospect does not care whether everyone in the meeting loved the campaign. Your prospect cares whether the campaign says something that matters to them.
Testing Turns Opinions Into Information
This is where direct-response marketing becomes especially powerful.
When two smart people disagree about a headline, we do not necessarily need another meeting. Sometimes we need two headlines and enough real prospects to tell us which one works.
Maybe one produces more clicks while the other produces fewer clicks but better leads. Perhaps the version everyone expected to win gets absolutely destroyed.
Whatever happens, we now know something we did not know before.
Testing turns an argument into an experiment, but that does not mean we need to test every comma, photograph, and button until the marketing department requires group therapy. Good testing answers meaningful questions about the things that can actually affect the business.
Does one offer produce more appointments? Does one message attract better prospects? Does one landing page turn more visitors into opportunities?
The objective is not to prove who was right in the meeting. It is to discover what works.
More Response Is Not Always Better Response
Even then, we have to measure the right thing.
Imagine one advertisement generates 200 leads while another generates only 80. The winner seems obvious until the sales team starts calling.
The 200 leads include people who cannot afford the service, people outside your market, and one gentleman who apparently thought he was entering a contest for a bass boat. That campaign ultimately produces six customers, while the campaign with 80 leads produces 24.
Now which one won?
Clicks matter, leads matter, appointments matter, sales matter, and customer value matters. Good marketers follow the response far enough to determine whether the marketing is producing the business result they actually want.
Otherwise, we can become remarkably good at optimizing the wrong thing.
Ego Is Expensive
Every experienced marketer has created something they loved that did not work. The dangerous marketer is not the one who occasionally gets something wrong; it is the one who refuses to believe the market when it happens.
When a campaign underperforms, get curious about the audience, offer, headline, proof, timing, or next step. Those questions can improve the next campaign considerably.
Defending the lasagna still will not make it taste better.
Clayton Makepeace’s lesson remains just as valuable today: we create the marketing, but we do not get to decide whether it is good. Our customers do.
If you are investing in marketing but are not sure what is actually producing customers, visit www.meetparthiv.com to schedule a complimentary Strategic Growth Session. We’ll look at what your market is telling you and where testing, measurement, or a different approach might uncover opportunities you have been missing.
Bring your opinions if you like. Just remember that the customer gets the final vote.
To your unstoppable success,
President
eLaunchers.Com