This is the first entry in what will be a weekly diary on marketing strategies and tactics. It is a topic I've written about more here recently and been happy by the response the diaries have generated. So this series is born.
My background is that I have worked as a marketing executive for almost 20 years with my primary focus on high-tech business-to-business (HP, AT&T, Peoplesoft, Lucent, EDS to name a few), environmental associations (WWF, NPCA), and some consumer work (AOL, Spanair, Cuisine Solutions).
Now I like to think my multiple degrees and experience matters, but to a large extent I've found people like to make their jobs sound far more complex than they actually are. Marketing can get very complex, but to a large extent the basics can be handled more with some elbow grease and common sense then years of experience and a large budget.
So that will be the primary focus of this series, outlining the basics to help somebody working on a grassroots political campaign secure votes, a group with an issue they want to raise awareness about, or just a small business owner who wants to market themselves more effectively.
Technology Has Changed Marketing
Maybe more than any industry I can think of, marketing has been utterly transformed by technology. It wasn't that long ago that the barriers to producing a web site, direct mailer, interactive CD-ROM, or print brochure were pretty steep, both in the amount of money required and the expertise to produce them. That is just no longer the case.
Heck, in a way I feel like I am about to reveal in these diaries some dirty little secrets about what is possible, often for free or nominal fees. You just don't have to pay my hourly rate, much less hire a design firm or ad agency. If you are willing to invest some time learning a new application or two, ask some questions and read a few help documents, the sky is the limit.
That is a primary focus of this series, to educate people on what is possible.
I Want To Motivate You To Action
Now that I am working for myself as an independent consultant I am dealing with smaller firms that don't have huge budgets. In my previous life my clients were huge, multinational firms. Heck if you didn't have a few million to spend you couldn't even get a meeting with us. You'd think working with a firm that has a well known brand and say a $20 million budget would be easier than working with a ten person firm with almost no budget.
In fact it is not. With a Fortune 500 firm you might have to get the approval of gosh knows how many people (marketing by committee -- the worse situation possible). It can take days, even weeks to get the most basic decision. And don't even get me started on internal politics and teams of lawyers.
Instead if you are a small business owner or an unknown person running for office and the only campaign staff are your husband and a few friends you can be nimble. You can make quick decisions. You can take chances and try new and/or different tactics. There is a reason that multi-billion dollar firms can be overtaken by a start-up in a few years. Of course at their core they have a quality product, but often the billion dollar firm didn't even know what hit them from a marketing point-of-view. And by the time they were able to respond it is usually too late.
Now I am not saying you won't make mistakes in your marketing activities, but inaction is almost always worse than no action at all. I've seen mistakes be made that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and the decisions were made by people that might have had a combined professional experience of a few hundred years. Mistakes happen, it is a fact of life.
I like to joke that in marketing 1+1 can equal 5. There is simply no "perfect" formula for marketing success, no matter how much research you conduct and how much experience you have. There are ways you can lower the risk, but never do away with it completely. So when mistakes are made all you can do is learn from them and move on.
The second focus of this series is to literally kick you in the rear and motivate you to action.
So What Would You Like To Learn About?
I want to talk about marketing topics this community cares about, not just what I find interesting. I feel very comfortable talking about almost any marketing topic outside of TV (only cost effective a handful of times for my clients) and ethnic marketing (zero experience).
My gut is this community will skew towards interactive topics, but in the initial schedule I've outlined below it is pretty much 50/50 between online and "traditional" tactics (there is overlap of course), cause both can be very effective and each serves a specific purpose. But I am more than willing to change the topics depending on what people are interested in learning about.
Future Marketing 101 Topics:
- What The Heck Is Marketing And Why Should I Care
- Web Site/Blog Development
- Pay-Per-Click Ads (Google, Yahoo!, & MSN)
- Public/Media Relations
- How Do I Measure The Effectiveness Of My Marketing?
- Interruption vs. Permission Marketing
- Social Media: Should I Even Care?
- Email Marketing Basics
- Paper-based Direct Mail
- Print Advertising Basics
- Trade Show/Event Marketing
- Online Webinars/Web Meetings
So let me know what you'd like addressed. Heck any comments, thoughts, and/or ideas are very welcome. I expect the topics and the format of this series to change over time, just like most marketing campaigns morph as more information is gathered and results are analyzed.
I'll see you back here each Monday morning around 8AM CST, which will be the scheduled time for this series moving forward.