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.)
