Minimize the grind: Begin with the end in mind.
By Roy Harryman
I begin marketing consultations with these questions:
What problems do you want marketing to solve?
What results do you want marketing to achieve?
When it comes to marketing, what does success look like?
Often these questions are met with silence and shrugged shoulders. That’s understandable. Sometimes small-business people and nonprofit leaders are so busy with the daily grind that they haven’t contemplated the answers. Yet they know they need to do something.
“Without goals, and plans to reach them, you are like a ship that has set sail with no destination.”
Whether you’re an army of one or leading dozens of employees, these questions must be squarely faced before you spend a dime on marketing.
Otherwise, you’re shooting at an unidentified target in the dark. You might hit it, but you’ll waste a lot of ammo in the process.
Don’t get me wrong. Marketing involves experimentation. But we can shrink the margin of error by at least knowing what we want.
Depending on your business or organization, your goal may be:
More retail foot traffic
Finding new employees
More sales appointments
Becoming known to customers in a new geographic territory
More online sales
More donations
Once we know what success looks like, we can step back and develop a plan. This plan takes precedence over tactical considerations such as:
Should I use Facebook or LinkedIn (or other social media)?
Should I do text or email marketing?
What about direct mail?
What about the thing my competitor is doing?
Should I redesign my website?
These are all important questions. But they are secondary to knowing exactly what you need marketing to do for you. Hard thinking, research and conversations are required to determine the answer. I think this is why many people skip this foundational stage and just start doing stuff. It feels easier to frenetically scramble about. You accomplished something, right? Not necessarily. Activity is not productivity.
There’s no question that activity will be required. But it must flow from a foundation of purpose and intent. Are you developing a marketing plan or reconsidering one? I encourage you to take a moment now and reflect on these questions:
What do I want marketing to do for me – specifically?
If I want more customers in the door, how many more do I need?
If I want more appointments, how many?
If I want to increase sales, by how much?
You get the point.
The clearer you can be, the more likely it is you can create a cost-effective plan to accomplish your goals.
ABOUT ROY HARRYMAN
Roy Harryman is the author of “Small Business, Big Impact: A No-Nonsense Marketing Strategy For Companies That Do More With Less.” This post is excerpted from the book.