Last night I heard a phrase that I suspect has been around a while but one I haven't heard before. The person was speaking about an organization's poor use of marketing money when they sank it into a lot of things that didn't work. What he said was: "They didn't get enough juice for the squeeze."
I like that statement. It's one I'll probably use from time to time...and when it comes to marketing, it succinctly says a lot of things about not getting all you had wanted from your efforts. Most marketers can relate to this at some level. I guess that's why it resonated with me.
The one additional thought I would add to this statement is that it assumes the right fruit is being squeezed to begin with. It makes me think about companies I've observed that do the same thing year after year and essentially say, "We squeezed this much juice out of these efforts last year so we expect to squeeze this much this year." What's not as regularly evaluated is the thing being squeezed. If there's a problem it's easy to think, "we just didn't get as much juice for the squeeze this time" but the problem might not be the juice, even though that's what's getting measured. It may the wrong fruit to begin with.
With many traditional marketing efforts the same old fruit is getting squeezed every day. The fruit is expensive, hard to get, hard to squeeze well, and producing less juice than ever. Social media marketing, however, is an entire farmer's market full of new fruits. If you're still squeezing the same old fruit it may be time for you to start checking out a few new flavors. You may find that squeezing some new fruit will give you sweeter, cheaper, and easier to access juice than you've ever had.