Now that the world is coming out of its recessionary doldrums, it’s time to take advantage of the opportunities to grow your business.  Here are 5 simple steps to make sure your marketing will achieve your goals:

1) Validate your understanding of your customers.  A lot may have changed with them over the last year.  Spend some time this fall finding out: 
- what are their biggest challenges
- how are they making decisions about what you sell
- what sources of information are they using now (and what do they trust)

2) create a profile of your target customers
- define what their characteristics and needs are.  

3) create a clear strategy. 
- what types of clients do you most want to attract (your target market)
- what do you offer to them (your value proposition)
- why should they buy from you (your competitive advantage)

4) identify the tactics you will use
- what specific tactics are you going to employ to reach your customers and generate awareness of your company.  your tactics should relate to your priorities – is it to create awareness, generate leads, enhance perception of your brand? 

5) identify new tactics and tools and experiment with them
- spend 10 – 15% of your annual marketing budget on new tools and media you haven’t used before.  the marketing world is changing fast.  you have to innovate or in a few years you’ll find your company badly out of date. 
 

I just saw an online advertisement for what seemed to be a neat marketing tool – a tool that measures the ‘freshness’ of your website (http://FreshWebSiteFeeling.com).  As we all know, websites stale-date quickly and you have to constantly add new features, contents and visuals to keep up. 

Based on the ad I saw, I thought this site would scan the site in question, evaluate the functionality / look and give it a freshness rating.  Instead, the tool is just a little calculator that, when you indicate when your site was last updated, will tell you how many ‘web years’ old it is.  Like the old dog years calculation – 3 human years is 21 dog years, etc.  Whoppee.  Nothing to do with how many dollars you invested or features you deployed. 

As a tool it was lame.  And my visit to the site very disappointing.  I won’t ever go back – and I think less of the company as a result. 

The lesson: Don’t let your marketing get ahead of your company.  Marketing is dangerous when you don’t have the goods to back up your promises.  The business world is littered with examples like this, and it’s the reason marketing has a bad reputation among many people.   

Have you heard the latest trend in informercials?  It’s mini-informercials of 2 – 3 minutes long that get bundled together as a 30-minute TV show and broadcast over major networks.  I received a call from one of these shows last year.  Their pitch was that they would come to our office, tape the team and clients doing what we do, put an informational spin on it and then broadcast it multiple times over a designated time frame.  They pitched it as though we had been chosen from among a select group of possible companies and that it was the chance of a lifetime.  There was just one small consideration – there would be a $25k cost (borne by Mezzanine) for them to come tape us. 

It all sounds so much like those telemarketing calls where you’re told you’ve won a vacation, you just have to pay $1000 to claim it. 

I’d love to hear from someone who’s had a good experience with these mini-informercials.  Not that I doubt that they can be powerful, I just think that a company has to be in the right industry and at the right stage of their evolution for it to work.  

For us, it didn’t make sense to pursue this because it wasn’t the right tactic given our market (types of customers and geographic reach).  When you’re thinking about what marketing investments to make, think carefully about what kinds of channels and tools will get through to your customers, and what kind of process they go through to make a buying decision. Don’t spend huge dollars on a ‘get marketing quick’ scheme, because more likely than not it won’t yield good ROI.   

There are some amazing advances in marketing execution with the advent of vendor portals like elance and vendorseek.  You can get your logo designed or website built in Argentina, Pakistan, Latvia or any other country at an unbelievable price – in many cases 20 – 50% of what you’d pay for a local vendor.  We’ve used these sources in the past, with some good and some bad results.  Our learning is this: these sources can be good, in 2 cases –

·         You don’t really need sophisticated design. What we’ve seen in comparing local vendors (who do charge more than those in typical ‘offshore’ countries) to offshore vendors is that local designers have a sophistication that can’t easily be matched by those outside of Canada and the US.  So if your brand / packaging / image is important – especially if it’s a consumer product you’re dealing with – it’s worth the money to spend on a local vendor.  On the other hand, if you just need a graphic designer to execute what you tell them to do (move this circle here, change the color, increase the font size), then offshore is a good way to go. 

·         You have lots of time to project manage.  We had a website designed a while ago by an offshore vendor.  The price was about half what we might have paid locally.  But wow did we pay the price in hours of time project managing our offshore vendor.  Our marketing manager was on the phone or email with them every day for about 5 weeks.  By the time we tallied up those hours, we really hadn’t saved much money.  And thank goodness our marketing manager was willing to invest those hours, otherwise our offshoring experiment would have been a budget disaster. 

We’ll continue to experiment with offshoring of marketing functions – as we’ve seen in offshoring of other activities,  this is a trend that will grow when used judiciously. 

Last night I killed a cockroach at the dinner table. No it wasn’t at my house, it was at the Japanese restaurant close to work. After the deed was done – my appetite was gone and I left the remaining half of my beef teriyaki uneaten. Our waitress offered us a measly 10% off a $35 meal and then balked at the notion of giving us any further compensation. My colleague, who had selected the restaurant, spends about $125 per month, $1500 annually, on meals for clients or networking meetings. And our waitress totally missed the point. Last night I killed a cockroach at the dinner table. Last night she killed any opportunity for us to give them another chance.