Successful promotion rests on five basics. Only two of them are promotion in the sense most people mean. The other three are the product, the way you deliver it and the hand-over itself, and if one of them is missing, even a well written campaign stalls.

If you have run a campaign that did not work, you probably went back to the ad. You change the headline, try another picture, perhaps adjust the audience. The chance that the fault sits in the ad itself is much smaller than it feels, and to see why you need all five basics in front of you.

The five basics

The source lists five things that successful promotion needs, and says that this is all there is to it:

  • Workable technology. Something to offer that people want and will accept.
  • Good execution of it. The customer gets the same thing every time, whoever serves them and wherever they are.
  • Accumulating identities. A list of people you can reach, in whatever form.
  • Offering those people something. A specific thing they will buy, such as a book or a service.
  • Delivering what was offered. The customer receives it.

The list itself sounds unsurprising. What the source says about it right afterwards is the surprising part.

Only two of them are promotion

The source marks the third and the fourth basics, accumulating identities and making the offer, as the two that are really promotion. In the same breath it adds that “all five must exist for promotion to be successful.”

So three of the five basics are not marketing at all. They are the product you offer, the consistency with which you provide it, and the delivery of what you promised. Without them the promotion fails anyway.

That explains a scene most business owners know: a campaign that looked great, read well and reached the right people, and still brought in nothing. The content of the campaign was fine. What was missing sat underneath it.

Suppose an events company that bought good copywriting and paid for the advertising. Both basics that count as promotion were excellent, yet delivery broke, and the customers who arrived never returned.

Or take a physiotherapy clinic that people recommend all the time and that has no way to book an appointment. The recommendations work. The offer simply does not exist.

What happens when you promote without the three

The source says plainly that promotion can run while the product, the execution or the delivery is missing, and it says what comes of that: “it dead ends all the time and becomes too expensive to do.”

Both halves matter. Dead ending means the promotion works a little and then stops, again and again. Too expensive means every customer costs you several times what they should, because each one has to be won again from zero.

This is the very symptom that leads people to conclude that advertising does not pay. Suppose a garage owner who pays roughly $80 in advertising for each new customer, and none of them return. Winning a customer costs a reasonable amount. The break comes after the customer arrives.

Next to him, picture a heating engineer who gets recommended and hardly advertises at all. Same town, same prices. At his end the three basics outside promotion are working.

So when promotion feels expensive, look at what it rests on. Often the promotion sits on a broken basic, and the ad budget pays for the break.

Four out of five is still not enough

The basics do not average out. One missing basic is enough to stop the rest.

Suppose a heating engineer with a service people like, work done the same way every time and a list of past customers, who never offers them anything. Four basics are in place, and the result is zero.

Or a design studio owner who promotes beautifully and runs late on every project. The promotion works. The business does not.

At the other end is a building contractor who is middling at all five basics and outstanding at none. He still has more work than he can handle. No basic is missing, and that makes the difference.

This is also why a further round of tweaks to the ad does not help when a basic is absent. If you are about to improve an ad for the fifth time, suspect that the problem is somewhere else.

The booklet gives this chapter two exercises, one to diagnose and one to spot the gap, followed by a self-check. The booklet as a whole is built around the five basics and helps you find which one is broken in your business.

The next time a campaign fails, before you touch the ad, ask which of the five basics is missing underneath it.