It’s a blustery Friday here in central New Hampshire, and we had the first big snow flurries outside our window this morning! Perfect for cuddling up by a warm baseboard heater and attending a marketing webinar.

Marketing Strategy, Budgeting, and Planning for 2008 was the topic, and it comes at the perfect time, since we’re gearing up for not only our own planning, but for our clients as well. (The registration link is here as of 11/16/07, for more info.) Leading the charge was Mike Schultz, Publisher of RainToday.com and President of the Wellesley Hills Group, a leading firm focused on marketing, sales, and overall revenue growth for professional services businesses.

(Full disclosure: Jae-ann Rock, Principal at SunStream Consulting, is a great friend of ours who’s worked with and has nothing but good things to say about the Wellesley Hills Group - and this webinar reinforced her word-of-mouth.)

One of the things I really appreciated out of the event was the style of content delivery - warm, breezy, and leavened with a generous helping of humor. A marketing mistake illustrated by an outake from Monty Python and the Holy Grail was the comedic highlight for me - about 1:18 into the clip below is the analogy of the wrong group of folks to be making marketing decisions:

And it also touched very directly on the concept of integrated marketing I’ve mentioned in a couple of my last blog posts. For example, they referenced a study where buyers rated seeing an in-person presentation as much more effective at getting them to buy something than, say, a telemarketing call.

But if you think that means telemarketing is a dead end, you’d be wrong. Telemarketing may not get people to buy, but it got people to go to the presentation … where they were much more likely to buy.

The point being, it’s not enough to understand how different marketing tactics work - you have to know how they work together. Sometimes it’s linear, where one thing leads to another, and sometimes it’s web-like, where one thing can lead in multiple directions, but the truth remains that you’ve gotta get to your audience regularly, in as many ways as you can handle, and track the results so you know what’s working.

What’s fun for you, and serves your audience at the same time? What brings new leads into your business most effectively, and what tactics best develop those leads into bonafide clients?

Answer those questions, and you set the foundation developing a solid marketing plan. Without those answers, you could be setting yourself up for failure - or for a success you don’t understand and can’t replicate.

(And to see some of the strategic marketing questions you should be asking yourself, check out Mike’s blog post on the subject.)

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Fun With Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Allen and I have had our hands full during the last six weeks or so.

Business has been flowing in like the tides during a full moon (thanks to Acorn Creative!). We just had a beautiful baby boy on October 5th who likes to socialize with us at all hours of the night. My brother got married three weeks ago, which was a glorious event all its own. Allen was in Boston for six days for clients and trade shows and podcast camps.

Plus, we’ve had to learn how to get mega points in the awesome adventure that is Lego Star Wars, because our 5-year-old son is ADDICTED, and had to buy Boba Fett at the Cantina in order to continue with his important mission of saving the galaxy from the evil Emperor.

So, it’s with less guilt than usual that I admit we’ve slipped a bit on our own marketing efforts. Our ezine has fallen off the schedule. Articles and press releases keep getting postponed. Website updates don’t quite hit the top priority list. It’s tough, because being consistent and strategic with marketing is what we preach to clients, workshop attendees, readers of our blog, and the world in general.

But something happens this time of year, every year, that makes us loosen our expectations. No, sadly, it’s not the loving preparation required to ramp up for the holiday season.

It’s FANTASY FOOTBALL.

This is Allen’s third year in a league that’s gifted us with the thrills of victory and the agonies of defeat more times than I care to mention. (Why are running backs so inconsistent?! Who knew field goal kickers could make or break a season?!)

But Allen’s interest in this supremely odd social and cultural addiction of the male species is not only understandable but encouraged. According to a new book, Why Fantasy Football Matters (And Our Lives Do Not), “U.S. businesses lose $200 million in productivity each football season because employees are managing their fantasy squads instead of working.”

Unbelievable, ain’t it? 

Obviously, you can’t fight this phenom, so you might as well join it. I just hope Allen makes it into the playoffs this year (and become the underdog who takes home the imaginary trophy!!!). The smile on his face is well worth the tens of thousands of dollars lost to productivity and abandoned marketing efforts, and I say this without a scoonch of sarcasm.

C’mon Allen - WIN THIS THING!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 10:56 am and is filed under Entrepreneur Diaries, Married - With Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

It’s a term we hear more and more (and use more and more), and you can kind of figure it out just by using the meanings of the words themselves. It’s something to do with tying together all the ways you promote your business, right?

Yes, but…

What, exactly, does the “tying together” entail?

And if you Google “integrated marketing,” you get all sorts of results. Some match, some overlap, and still others talk about entirely different things from the first results you see.

So what does it mean to integrate your marketing? Well, at the highest level, it’s all about consistency. Whether it’s for a single product campaign (short term) or your overall marketing strategy (long term), to integrate means to maintain the same voice, tone, and style in every place your audience could find you - design-wise, and content-wise.

The next level down is the planning. In a campaign, you want to plan to reach your audience as many ways as possible within a tight timeframe. Movies are a great example of this, because the studios have to get you to go to the movie within a week or two of it coming out, for them to have a shot at making a profit.

The long term type of planning involves Content Strategy and Dignity Marketing™. It’s creating a plan to consistently educate, inform, and entertain your audience so that, when they’re ready to buy, you’ve been at the top of their mind all along while they were considering their options, building a relationship instead of just selling, selling, selling.

And then it’s the connection. No marketing element should operate in isolation anymore. No one on earth buys what you have to sell based on one marketing touch. Instead, you connect one marketing touch with another - and gives your audience a low-risk reason to make the connection.

A direct mail piece that directs the reader to a website for a free download. An article that directs readers to a free ezine with more useful tips, tricks, and strategies. A networking event, where you exchange business cards for a CD of one of your introductory audio class recordings.

Get the idea?

And in the online world, your website is at the center of this integration. Everything you put out into the world should drive people to your website where, once they share contact information in exchange for something you offer, you can build relationships that meet their needs - and build a business for yourself, whether you’re brick ‘n mortar, ecommerce, or both.
Okay, I’m getting off the soapbox for now. 

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 12:04 pm and is filed under Fun With Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

We’re not members of our local Chamber of Commerce (though I just got an application, and Lani and I may do it for 2008), but I got invited to co-present at a recent brown-bag lunch seminar for local business owners by our good friend and business ally Kevin Skarritt.

The topic was integrated marketing, and over cookies and soda (and yes, the occasional lunch), Kevin talked about David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing and PR, and how all marketing efforts should tie back into other marketing channels, especially to your website - the hub of your integrated marketing strategy.

I was there because you need content for marketing, and because these days, you can use content in so many ways to get your message out there. Speaking for my fellow Content Lover Lani, we like to use our content in as many ways as possible. For example, one article can be:

• sent out through an article submission service
• submitted to a press release service
• used in our ezine
• posted on our blog
• compiled for an eBook
• used as part of an autoresponder email series or ecourse
• recorded for an audio or video podcast
• given away at networking events

And so on. Very few people will see an article from us in more than one place, but those who do are likely to say, “Hey, that must be a good article if it’s in more than one place.” Which makes us the experts - and if you do the same with YOUR articles, you’ll get the same reaction from your audience. That’s the gist of the content insights I shared at the lunch.

With all the content vehicles out there - only a handful of which are in those bullets - I could see a bit of overwhelm creeping in on the faces and body language of some of the folks at the lunch. Here’s how to defeat that overwhelm: start with just one content vehicle, that’s fun and useful for both you and your audience. Get good at that one, keep track of how well it’s working (or not), and don’t add any more until you can handle it.

And if you’re starting to plan for your 2008 marketing, the “start with just one” mantra might be good to keep in mind.

If you want to learn more about the easiest, biggest-bang-for-the-smallest-buck content vehicles out there, please check out our “A-Ha Yourself!” Action Guide, and start putting your boldest insights into joy-filled action.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 1:53 pm and is filed under All About Content, Fun With Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.