If you have had anything to do with marketing in your business, you likely realized early on that there is a mind numbing number of choices available to you. Between traditional marketing and the channels that exist on the Internet, the range of potential marketing tactics (all with "experts" saying "THIS is the right one! Pay me and I'lll tell you how to do it!) is intimidating as hell.
Take this list, posted on a "virtual assistance" site, which includes a bunch of marketing type items:
- Customer Service/Relations (follow up calls, Email Inquiries, etc.)
- Internet Research
- Document Creation/Formatting
- Product/Service Reports
- Thank You Notes
- Newsletter/eZine Creation/Management
- Email Marketing
- Bulk Mailings
- Article/Press Release/Blog Submission
- Invitations
- PowerPoint Presentations
- Mail merges for letters and labels
- Direct Mail project creation and management
- Collections (calls, letters and demands)
- Follow-up with clients to obtain testimonials.
- Reports and Research (research, writing and compiling)
- Ebook Design and Formatting
- Event, meeting, and seminar planning and advertising
- Desktop Publishing
- Graphic Creation/Manipulation
- Business card Design
- Flyer Design
- Blog Creation/Maintenance
- Simple Website Changes/Updates/Maintenance
- Market Research
- Marketing Assistance
- Google AdWords Campaign Creation/Management
- Search engine optimization
- Submitting your website(s) to search engines and directories
- Brochures Design/Creation
And this is a virtual assistance firm, not a marketing services provider! Step up a notch and you will quadruple this list--webinar production, online advertising, seminar/workshop production, trade shows, conferences, podcasts, radio shows and on and on.
Surviving the tsunami of marketing choices requires clarity, understanding, and patience. Clarity around what results you want to achieve. Understanding of what a candidate marketing initiative requires in terms of resources and tasks. Patience in terms of the time it will take to see a return and also in terms of measuring and making adjustments to improve results.
Integration is also important...whichever marketing tactics you elect to pursue, be sure to dovetail them so that they complement one another.
And if the list you come up with is still long, exercise more patience--select no more than 3 tactics to implement and get going. Master them, get them running like well-oiled machines (which includes having them help increase revenues), then added another one, two or three tactics. If one of them isn't producing the right results, change it or drop it. The point is to do it in chunks and make sure it's working!
Recent Comments