Blow Your Marketing Budget on Advertising

Mea culpa. This is a stupid mistake I made very recently. In fact, my business partner, Paul, and I joked that we had to painfully relearn something we have known for fifteen years. Advertising doesn’t work in professional services businesses. I can sense what you are thinking. “OK genius, if you don’t spend your marketing dollars on advertising, just where do you spend them?” I think you owe me a little more patience than that. Let’s start out with what Paul and I relearned this year.


Last year if you had grabbed me on the street and asked me how we have grown our business, I would have immediately responded, “100% of our business comes from referrals and business networking groups like the chamber of commerce.” It probably would have sounded every bit that robotic and rehearsed. However last October, we had the brilliant idea of celebrating our twentieth anniversary with a broad advertising campaign. See the problem yet? We know what works, but we decide to do something different anyway. Maybe you should be writing this instead of me. Rack up our first mistake.

We compounded mistake number one by making an even more stupid mistake. I can best illustrate this with your assistance. Please grab the five people closest to you. No… you can ignore that guy. He does look strange. Then ask them on a scale of one to ten, ten being the highest, “How deeply did you care about Stitely & Karstetter’s twentieth anniversary?” Please be respectful of my feelings as you give me the results. Add all the numbers together. Then divide by five to get the average. If you can’t carry off the math, grab a fifth grader. Let me guess the results. The average was greater than zero but less than one. No! The result was actually zero???? Big surprise there. No one really gives a damn about a CPA firm’s anniversary. Rack up mistake number two.

We can summarize this marketing campaign as follows. We rolled out a marketing campaign that was inappropriate for our business with a marketing message no one could possibly care about. I am patting myself on the back for this one. Good job stud. You should be asking me to step away from the computer.

Let’s summarize the results of this hideously expensive putrid mess of a marketing plan. We got two new clients. You should be wondering how we survived. I don’t blame you, but in fact our revenue grew 15% year over year during the tail end of a recession. How did that happen? Remember when I said above that 100% of our business comes from referrals and networking? Paul and I have spent most of our twenty years in business together building our referral network. Building a referral network isn’t as easy or as quick as throwing together an advertising campaign, but it really works. Here is your answer, oh impatient one. Spend your marketing dollars building a referral network.