subject: Effective Marketing Strategies Are Actions Not Activities [print this page] Vision without action is a daydreamVision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare. This Chinese Proverb reverberated in my mind during conversation with some of the attendees to the Propel Conference held for NW Indiana business owners and executives in April of 2010.
The focus of this conference was marketing for small business owners, sales professionals and C Suite executives. Attendees received the 30,000 foot view from one marketing expert. Then I brought them down to Sea Level with a focused presentation on the all too common elevator pitch. Finally a social media coach gave them a side path of how to use this emerging marketing strategy.
Even though the perspectives were different from each presenter, three common threads emerged:
Effective marketing is a planned action or actions not an activity
Absolute necessity for a formal, written marketing plan
Ineffective marketing drains profits
Unfortunately, most marketing is viewed as an activity. Here are some examples:
Business networking events without a written goal or measurable outcomes
Websites that do not lead to actual sales
Social media (such as Tweets or writing on walls) that is not directly connected to predetermined goals
To change an activity to an action requires a map or in this case a marketing plan with specific goals. Now your ability to get your message out, to be noticed, to stand out in the crowd or what I call Be the Red Jacket begins to generate results.
For example, each business networking event attended, you would ask yourself these questions:
Will my target market be there?
Who do I want to meet?
How many appointments do I want to secure?
Examining your website, you would ask yourself these questions:
Is my site securing traffic?
How many unique visitors, hits, etc. am I receiving on a monthly basis?
Is my traffic growing, declining or staying the same?
Is my website search engine friendly allowing me to gain more traffic? (This is called search engine optimization or SEO.)
How many visitors are turning into customers? (This is called conversion.)
Looking at social media, these questions need to be asked:
Is my target market (potential customers) using this social media?
Why am I using this marketing strategy?
What are the expected results?
How will I measure the results?
What other actions do I need to take? (Most social media drives people to websites and many websites are not effective.)
During good times and bad times, the marketplace must know of your business. To do that requires marketing. When you learn to take actions and not engage in just activities, you will eventually increase sales (for effective marketing is a process) and improve profits.
So if you want to take a behind the curtain pre-release look at the facebook secret that is about to shake the internet to its core then I strongly recommend you read everything on the next page before it's too late!
