Too many offers, and no reliable way to bring work in.

Where it started

Three problems, and only one of them was marketing

The clock was short. Whatever was done had to pay for itself in weeks rather than quarters, so nothing about the work could be open-ended.

The offering had spread too thin. Selling a bit of everything to anybody who asked had diluted what the name stood for. A prospect could not tell in a sentence what the company was for.

There was no pipeline to speak of. Work arrived when it arrived. Nothing about it could be planned, forecast or repeated.

What was fixed first

The offer, before a rand of advertising

Running a campaign on top of a confused offer buys you more people who cannot tell what you sell.

Only then did the advertising start — a directed campaign with a capture step designed to filter out the enquiries that were never going to buy, and creative matched to the new offer rather than the old catalogue.

The return

One rand in, five rand and a bit back

The numbers

What the campaign returned

Why the order mattered

Advertising a confused offer is the most expensive thing a business can do

Every rand spent pointing people at a business that cannot say what it sells buys the same ten seconds of confusion, repeated. That is true when trading is good. Under that kind of time pressure, it is fatal.

Consolidating the offer first meant the campaign had one clear thing to advertise, the capture step had a clear thing to qualify against, and the numbers had one thing to measure. The campaign was not the clever part. The order was.