Emulating someone else’s proven system provides no assurance that it will work for you.

One of the greatest patent battles in history was over who invented the regenerative circuit, i.e. the positive feedback loop. This is a battle that dragged through the courts for 12 years and ended in 1934. The legal victor was Lee de Forest. Yet his adversary, Edwin Howard Armstrong was still accepted by most in the engineering community as the true inventor. In simple terms the battle was won, not by who filed first, nor by who actually got something to work first, nor by who could properly explain how the circuit worked, but rather, by who had a dated drawing and some lab notes. So much for the old patent laws.

One of the things that is most striking is the nature of the two individuals themselves. Certainly both men were driven inventors in their own right. But they couldn’t be more opposite in how they operated. Lee de Forest was a voracious reader and consumed all of the technical content that was published; and in fact, he was a Yale PhD. From this vantage point, he sought to emulate and build on the concepts of others. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the approach. It’s just that building on the proven systems of others, or the thinking of others, just did not result in a breakthrough. It may be true that he hooked up a vacuum tube in some manner that resembled a regenerative circuit. But he just did not understand how it worked, and it certainly did not result in amplification; (which was the whole point of the circuit).

Edwin Howard Armstrong on the other hand, did not put a lot of faith in the knowledge published by others, nor in mathematical explanations of how things worked. It may have served as a starting point, as it did for de Forest, but Armstrong’s focus on proving things for himself through his own experiments, was unstoppable. Through his understanding of electronics, he was all about theorizing, experimenting, analyzing, and seeking to understand. Even in the courts, there was no doubt that he truly and intimately understood everything about the regenerative circuit.

The same distinction of efforts must be made when you are formulating your demand generation methods. You can’t just do what worked for others. It may not work for you. Especially in a marketing world that is constantly changing, what worked yesterday, may not work today. In fact, you must be even more conscientious that what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow.

Your return on investment will not be the greatest by soaking up all those case studies, and studying excessively as to what and how others are driving their marketing. But rather, you must be driven to experiment in order to derive, discover and understand both what combination, and what sequence of activities, will yield predictable results. You need to elevate yourself to the point where you have developed a “sense” of the dynamics. And metaphorically speaking, an understanding of how your regeneration circuit works.

This means that you can’t design your demand generation system based on someone else’s proven system, unless it is your own proof. For the emulation approach to work, your situation would need to be exactly like the organization that derived the proven system. It happens all the time with CEOs and executives when they succeed marvelously in one company. And when they apply the same model to their new company, they at times fail dramatically. At the end of the day, you can’t get around it. Developing “your” marketing messages and deriving “your” demand generation system is a key investment to your overall success.

Your source for new business can come from one of 3 channels: cultivating existing customers; an inbound marketing strategy; or an outbound marketing strategy. The proportion in which you mix these 3 channels will be determined by both the nature of your specific product offering, coupled with the nature of your particular target market. Finding the right mix for your business results in that reliable stream of new business which you are after.

Cultivating Existing Customers
Cultivating new business from existing customers fits with the farming analogy. That is, you currently have the right fields to raise the targeted set of crops. And you are proficient at farming: you know when and how to plant the seeds, how to nurture, and how to harvest.

But you can only farm if you have access to a sufficient amount of arable land, which represents existing customers in this analogy. Existing customer are those who meet the real definition of customers; i.e. a consummated relationship in which they have bought something from you before.

The fact that they have bought from you before, means that they have experienced your product offering. There can be no substitute for this. Having bought something from you means that they know you better than those who they have not bought anything from. Conversely, it also means that you know them better than any new prospective customer.

And this is what removes the randomness of communications. It is the most fluid of relationships. An existing customer is more likely to pay attention and listen to what you have to say, more than any newcomer. They associate value with you and their past experience, and this brings with it a certain amount of earned credibility. It’s real brand equity.

Inbound Marketing Strategy
An inbound marketing strategy is one which you seek to attract new business to come to you. It is the fishing analogy. That is, you must know where the good fishing spots are, when the best times to fish are, and the type of bait that will get the fish to bite.

And if you can get all of that right, you still need some actual skill once you get them on the hook. There is more than one fish story where the fish broke the line, or jumped out the net. So you need the right combination of skill and patience to reel them in.

Translating this to marketing terms, it means you need to be putting out marketing messages that will attract potential customers. More specifically, you are putting out messages that define the problem you are solving, and why it is important to solve. And you present yourself as a bountiful source of knowledge and information on the subject. New customers are drawn to the information that you are offering up, because they self-identify with the situation.

An inbound strategy is effective when your product offering is addressing a problem that is on the minds of potential customers. If the problem is commanding a certain amount of attention in the mind of your prospective customer already, there will be a natural affinity to the messaging that you are putting out there. Reeling them in from that starting point, requires effective content to further persuade them to come in closer.

Outbound Marketing Strategy
An outbound marketing strategy is one in which you target and seek out the customer. This is the hunting analogy. Similar to the fishing analogy, you must know where your prey is to be found. But unlike fishing, they are not underwater and are clearly visible to you, and they are there for the taking.

To be effective, you need to be skilled at using your weapon of choice. If your skill is not good enough, you miss the shot and the prey gets away. If your choice of weapon is not good enough, you may hit the prey, but it may still get away licking its wounds.

Translating this to marketing terms, it means that you go directly after the prospective customer that fits the profile. You have a deep understanding of the problem you are solving, as well as the set of customer profiles that can justify and benefit from acquiring your solutions. So your qualification of the prospective customer can occur quite efficiently.

Your main challenge here is the ability to get that necessary attention from a customer who is happy with the status quo. You marketing and sales efforts must be very well targeted. Otherwise as they say, “close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades”.

Ultimately, the mix of strategies that you blend into your new customer acquisition model depends on your business. It will be driven by the receptivity of your target market to the various channels, and the suitability of your product offering to the various channels. Recognize that your choices will be driven by strategies that are effective at bringing in new business, while maintaining a reasonable cost of customer acquisition. Otherwise you will starve or go broke.

Just in case you had any doubts about the effectiveness of digital marketing, a recent story in The National Post may help you think otherwise. The story is about a business who recruited US distributors to sell silicon germanium (SiGe) semiconductors, which were to be fabricated in China.

The whole business was a complete sham. But the fact that they were able to execute so well in securing $13m in advance deposits over a 4 year period, really makes you ask: How could they have possibly been able to succeed?

Did the company gain the trust of an existing customer base through successful previous business dealings? And then decide to dupe them through the bogus Chinese SiGe. That of course is the popular playbook for investment management fraud.

But that is not the case here. There was no previous business relationship which they took advantage of and manipulated. These business partners were not known to them at all. The key to their success was in fact, you guessed it, digital marketing.

Now you may say that this is just spam. But this does not fall into your typical consumer spam categories. You know the ones: guaranteed weight loss programs; knock-off Rolexes; knock-off Viagra; schemes to increase the size of certain body parts; Russian brides. No, this is high tech. This is a hard sell. Anyone buying technology products is very discerning about the product or service that they are buying. These are the guys who won’t be duped. Yet they were.

Ok. So here is how it breaks down. These are the actual steps that they followed:

1. They hired a web-design specialist.
Unfortunately, we don’t get to look at their website. The whole thing was shut down in 2013 and the culprit accepted his plea bargain and is going to jail. But, this must have been quite a persuasive web site. Full of great marketing content and images. And to some extent, the whole value proposition for the SiGe wafers must have been established.

2. They purchased mail lists.
Now these were not random mail lists. They were from Vietnam. So what kind of mail list from Vietnam has names of individuals who may potentially buy-in to an opportunity to import SiGe from China. Well, quite likely, it is a list of individuals who were interested in these types of opportunities; i.e. importing technological components into the US. So this was a targeted list.

3.They created an email marketing campaign.
You know the aggregate statistics on open rates for unsolicited email are really low. Besides staying out of the spam filter, the only way to improve open rates is to have a subject heading that resonates with the recipient. And then there must have actually been content in the body of those emails, that got the recipient to respond to the call-to-action.

4.Follow-up.
They smoothly transitioned from the marketing cycle to the sales cycle. Somehow they were able to provide sufficient proof in order to get real commitments from their prospects: i.e. advance cash deposits.

Now obviously this was a scam. And they indeed provided all the necessary falsehoods in order to move their prospects to a close. But their marketing methodology seems to be have been quite sound. They were able to come in as an unknown company, offer a value proposition to a discerning target customer, execute a targeted digital marketing campaign, and accomplish their objective of signing up distributors, and obtaining sizable up-front deposits. It certainly should make you think: are you getting the most out of your own marketing strategy?