A recent article discusses the ways that marketing has lost its focus. It brings up an extremely great point, which is that all business marketing efforts should be cohesively interconnected rather than separated silos of communication.
A recent article discusses the ways that marketing has lost its focus. It brings up an extremely great point, which is that all business marketing efforts should be cohesively interconnected rather than separated silos of communication.
The Leaky Bucket Theory
In marketing, the term “leaky bucket” refers to a business losing its customers. The holes in the bucket refer to the reasons why customers are often lost. Rather than pouring more water into the bucket, businesses should work on patching up the holes, first and foremost.
The author gives the following “full bucket” marketing scenario:
Full Bucket
You create a feature article based on a buyer persona. (not a marketing persona or social media persona – a complete buyer persona that takes all channels into account)
You put it on your website with a link to it from your home page, perhaps a graphic.
From within the article, you link to an upcoming webinar on a related topic to connect the dots to what buyers can do next. Perhaps you also hyperlinked to a blog post that expands on a concept in the article.
You used keywords in your title and headers and a few strategic places when writing the article. The URL for the article also contains those keywords.
You developed a series of Tweets to share it with your network – also with keywords or even a hashtag.
You wrote an email with a link back to the article and assigned it to go out to a segment of your database that is represented by the buyer persona.
You started a LinkedIn discussion about the topic in a group where it’s relevant and included a link to the article.
You also set up a Google alert on the title and keywords so that you will be able to see if the article gains traction in any other channels, so that you can be sure to respond.
On the other hand, here is a “leaky bucket” scenario from the article:
Leaky Bucket
Perhaps you wrote the article and passed it off to the IT team to be published to the website and went on to the next thing on your list. But, because you didn’t tell them what keywords to use they just publish it without any.
Maybe, if you’re lucky, the social media team spots it and thinks – Yeah! Something new to Tweet about. Hmm. Let’s see – what shall we say? Oh heck – grab the title and link and post it. And yeah, let’s schedule it to auto tweet every 3 hours for the next 2 days.
A website visitor sees the article and posts it to a LinkedIn group starting a discussion that skews the premise and goes off in a direction you didn’t anticipate. But, because monitoring LinkedIn isn’t your job, you don’t see it and the discussion is gaining steam.
And on it goes.
This is an example of how marketing efforts can leak out of the bucket and cost businesses their customers.
With so many channels of communication, it is more important than ever to be aware of the bucket’s leaks and find ways to patch them up. What we’re seeing happen frequently is that rather than taking the time to create a strategy to solve the problem, businesses are spending more and more money on marketing efforts. They are trying to fix the problem with no resolve.
In fact, the customers are left hanging without access to the full picture of what the business is truly about. Customers are essentially experiencing a split-personality business. To mend this, businesses need a cooperative buyer persona in order to produce the best results in today’s business environment.
Building a “Brand Persona”
To keep from having holes in their buckets, businesses can create a more holistic marketing strategy.
When marketing an ecommerce store, everything should cohesively work together to bring a coherent brand identity to the customers. In order to do this, the entire business team can take on a “Buyer Persona.” This persona will stay the same, from the sales call to the designing of the site. Then, everything will have a collective voice.
Developing a buyer persona is simply translating buyer’s goals into a cohesive strategy. Keeping all ecommerce initiatives focused on meeting the buyer’s goals will lead the business to winning strategies.
