I hear this question and see it posted on web sites all the time. The ensuing discussion typically revolves around various tools and tactics that can be used in a marketing campaign – everything from jingle generators, to online advertising, to good old word of mouth.
Any one of these tactics may end up being successful, but it depends – and that’s the problem. Too often we look at a tool as the answer without first developing a marketing strategy. Simply put, your marketing strategy is the combination of your Ideal Customer profile and your Core Message.
I find that this idea of starting from a strategy makes sense to people on an intellectual level, but often gets short shrift at implementation time. It’s easier to skip over the hard, somewhat abstract, work of fully developing a strategy and jump right into “doing something”.
But in order to successfully implement a particular tactic, we must answer several questions – here are a few:
- Who should I talk to?
- What should I say?
- What should I offer?
- Where should I say it?
If you have a well developed strategy, these questions are easy to answer. When you don’t, something like this happens:
- You make a draft
- You ask a couple people if they like it (without thought to whether or not they fit your ideal customer profile)
- You try it once
- You wait
- You get frustrated because you spent a lot of money and “marketing doesn’t work”.
Spend some time working on marketing strategy and you will create more successful marketing campaigns.
As the amount of available information on the internet continues to expand, we are constantly searching for new and improved ways to search for that information.