“It’s not what you know about something that makes the difference, it’s what you do with that knowledge.”
~ Debra Hilton
Understanding the Fundamentals of Your Marketing
Many businesses, both large and small, overlook the fundamentals of marketing and put their future in peril.
Large corporations often rely on historical precedent to guide their messaging, media and target market. This seems to be ok… until suddenly it’s not, and the company wakes to find that they have been asleep at the wheel while smaller, more specialised, alternatives stole their market from under their noses. Smaller businesses frequently don’t have a guiding marketing strategy, so their marketing is dependent on the whim of the person nominally in charge, or worse, the most vociferous telemarketer or online advertiser… although this does demonstrate the power of consistent follow up (which is a key marketing fundamental).
Marketing is like any other area of your business (finance, HR, legal): you can outsource the execution of it, but you should understand the principles and lay down the guidelines your marketing will follow unless you want to suffer the consequences of what I call ‘marketing schizophrenia’. I expect my clients to have a broad grasp of what their marketing strategy is and why it is that why so they do not fall victim to shiny object syndrome and fail to lay the solid foundations necessary for longterm growth.
Done is Better than Perfect!
I was discussing marketing with the CEO of an organisation recently and he said, “Our marketing director has been working on a new strategy for eighteen months, and we were going to launch it next week. Unfortunately, the current situation means that the messaging needs to be changed so we’re pushing it out for a few months while things return to normal.”
He must have noticed my consternation because he explained that the sales team had kept on working. Just to clarify, we’re not talking about a new car model or something that was waiting on R&D to launch, we’re talking about marketing a service business… and they had already identified the problem: all that time and effort wasted by political and economic factors out of their control.
What he didn’t realise is that after eighteen months they had no data to prove that their new messaging worked. Of course, there’s also no guarantee that in a couple of months the messaging will work in the ‘new normal’.
Contrast that with the ‘launch and iterate’ approach which provides a strong proof of concept in far less than eighteen months.
Systems Beat RAM Any Day!
Random Acts of Marketing or (RAM) are the bane of most businesses!
Often RAMs are the result of poor strategic planning, but usually the culprit is lack of a coherent set of marketing principles to guide actions. The result is lower than expected interest, fewer sales, and a discouraged sales team.
One of my consulting clients was able to pull out his recession marketing materials from 2009 this year and plug them into his existing system, others had to write new materials, but at least they had existing systems which dictated the format and provided a vehicle into which they could plug their updated offers and messaging.
I’ve also talked to people who were starting from scratch… as they do every time they launch a new offer or need new clients. I hope that you can imagine the wasted effort and stress that not have even ONE successful existing marketing campaign that provides a baseline against which to measure others creates.
Iterate and Improve
Once you create a single systematised campaign (even if you don’t automate its execution and rely on human effort) that works, you can work on plugging any holes where prospects, referrals, and clients are leaking out in a way that you can’t match with modelling software. That systemised campaign also provides a baseline against which you can test alternative messages, offers, and media. Since it is an evergreen resource, it can probably run for years with only minor tweaks during which time you can build out a variety of other pathways and resources providing you with stability and peace-of-mind no matter how chaotic the world around you may seem.
Explore the Magic of Marketing by Fundamentals
My book, Dynamic Direct Response Copywriting teaches how to develop campaigns based on proven marketing principles as well as researching and writing powerful advertising copy that irresistibly attracts your ideal prospect and pre-disposes them to work with you.
Purchase your copy today at https://hiltoncopywriting.mykajabi.com/offers/vLy6oYgm