Twirling, twirling… always twirling
There is a line in the Spielberg/ Hanks/ Di Caprio film “Catch me if you can”, delivered by Christopher Walken that sums up how a lot of people approach marketing for me:
“Two little mice fell into a bucket of cream. The first mouse quickly gave up and drowned, but the second mouse, he struggled so hard that he eventually churned that cream into butter and he walked out.”
Look at your marketing to date. Are you struggling so hard in the belief some of your marketing simply must be paying off, or it will eventually? Are you the mouse hoping to escape the bucket through sheer willpower alone?[mc4wp_form id=”15877″]
It is a hard question to ask yourself and answer honestly, because if you don’t like the answer it means you’ve potentially wasted a lot of time and money.
This season’s must have accessory
We all know we need a website, thats just plain common sense for a modern business isn’t it? But what about Facebook, Twitter, G+, a blog, magazine adverts, SEO, PPC, affiliates, PR, email marketing… We all need those don’t we?
Each channel will pick up a sale here and there, sure, but what type of ROI are you getting? For example, from personal experience I know that in an industry I’ve worked in not a single company makes a profit on affiliate marketing, but they all persist because they all persist! If they are all doing it, then we must as well.
Laser scalpel or machine gun?
Marketing with no aims, objectives or targeting is what I describe as “scattergun marketing”. If you spray enough bullets at least one of them has a chance of hitting your target. Equally, a lot won’t, and each of those bullets costs money!
Marketing plans do need have to be an opus
Marketing plan templates you find online can look overwhelming. The truth is, unless you are a major corporation with huge teams, they only need to be a page or two of A4. These simple questions are a great place to start building your own framework:
- Who are my customers?
- What do they want from their supplier?
- How do I best deliver that?
- Why should they choose us?
- When are the most receptive to my marketing?
- Where are they most receptive to my marketing?
A large portion of what you should be doing will spin off from these simple points. The important things is you stop and actually ask these questions before you have started to burn through your marketing budget like a tommy gun.[mc4wp_form id=”15877″]
I was watching Catch Me If You Can at the weekend and absolutely love that quote! In another way it rings true for me for SEO in general with the shift towards inbound marketing and earning the attention of your audience. It can seem like a constant struggle to get noticed by the right audience, at the right time, with many clients still wanting a ‘quick fix’ saying ‘can’t you just build me more links?’ It’s never going to be as simple as that, like you say it’s crucial to ask the basic questions at the start, figure out who your audience are and what they’re looking for.
Yes creating interesting, insightful content may take more time when compared to ‘scattergun marketing’ but eventually it should make everybody happier! It what we call .