How often in your business do you find it difficult to set priorities for your marketing? Have your ever felt that you are being bombarded with great ideas that have the potential to transform your marketing, if only you had the expertise to implement them well?
Just when you felt you had had got to grips with your traditional marketing like advertising, brochures and leaflets along comes the website. Next your website has to be found ahead of your competitors – you now need to use SEO or pay per click just to get yourself noticed.Once the website was sorted along came the social media revolution and now your website has to have links to a Facebook page, your LinkedIn profile, your blog and twitter activity. Talk to the experts right now and the latest bright new shiny objective is to have company videos on YouTube and a Google+ account.
Typically business owners and managers we talk to feel a little like a ‘rabbit in the headlights’. The huge number of choices before us means that there is a danger we can become paralysed and unable to take a sensible decision regarding investing our time and money wisely. Spread out our precious marketing budgets too thinly across too many activities and we risk being ineffective in our communication, as well as feeling exhausted by all the effort we have to put in trying to implement it all! Or perhaps the opposite problem happens, when we invest heavily into one channel of communication only to feel regret at a later date when we think we have missed out on opportunities that could have given our business a better return on investment had we opted for a different way of communicating.
Of course, the best course of action is to have a marketing plan with well thought out strategies. But ocasionally, even with sensible plans and strategies in place, we could still fail to achieve the desired results if we try to implement everything all at once.
Mike Crosson has a great way to illustrate this problem of trying to accomplish too many new strategies at once.Imagine you are on an island and you can see another island in the distance. On this second island is a pot of money. In order to access the money you need a method to build a bridge between yourself on your island and the money on the distant island – your strategy.
Let’s say, for example, you decide that LinkedIn could be the means of building this bridge between the islands so that you can access the money. You start spending a little time each day on LinkedIn, making new connections and working on your LinkedIn strategy. However a few weeks into this building activity, before it starts to work for you, someone says to you “You need to have some great videos to get your message across to customers, it’s a great way to get new business”.
They may be correct about the videos but it’s easy for you to make the mistake of dropping the LinkedIn activity before the strategy is in place and working effectively, i.e. you didn’t finish building the LinkedIn bridge between those islands first. Diverting your time and effort into having some new videos done could mean that you don’t acccess money from LinkedIn – that wasn’t finished – and you haven’t completed your video bridge either so there is no income from the video marketing.
What would happen if you then tried to start a Facebook strategy when someone else tells you this is a great way to win new business? I’m sure you get the idea.
You can watch Mike’s video via this link and then click on the third one in the sequence – How To Ensure That You Complete The Things That You Start So That You Get More Closings
So, to avoid being the rabbit in the headlights, have a plan, and have a few well thought out strategies that will connect you and your business with those exciting new opportunities or new customers. But be careful with implementating your marketing. Make sure that each communication bridge is sound and that it is accessing a good income stream before turning your attention, time and effort into the next big new shiny idea
Gill