The last day of 2007. The day before a whole year of possibilities! Did you spend December planning out your marketing? Or is that your first order of business come January 2nd?

Well, I know some folks hate, loathe, and despise doing marketing plans, so let me suggest a very easy one (just 3 steps!), inspired by my lovely wife and business partner.

In looking back over the year, Lani discovered that we:

Wrote 15 articles…

Sent out seven press releases…

Recorded 10 ADD Info Summits…

Landed 10 speaking engagements…

Attended five high-profile business events…

Created six information products…

And wrote this, our 100th blog post of the year!

We asked ourselves if, had written these out verbatim at the beginning of 2007 as our goals for the year, would we have believed we could pull this whole shebang off? The answer, in all honesty, was a resounding “No way!”

Which leads me to the easy 3-step marketing planning thing:

Step 1: List everything you did for marketing last year.

Step 2: It’s likely that 20% of those activities brought in 80% of your revenue last year. Which activities are they? List the top 3-5 that gave you the best return on investment.
Step 3: Do more of (and spend more on) those biggest-bang-for-the-buck activities next year than you did last year.

At the risk of bogging you down in more percentages, here’s a good guideline from Greg Stuart, co-author of What Sticks. Initially given as advice for allocating advertising dollars, the concept works just as well for the broader marketing picture:

Spend 70% of your marketing money on what’s already working; spend 20% tweaking things that you like but aren’t performing as well as you’d hoped; and spend the last 10% trying something entirely new.

I’m calling this the Monday Morning Marketing Plan because it’s like the concept of Monday-morning quarterbacking - analyzing and making judgments on the basis of hindsight. As marketing plans go, it doesn’t get much simpler. Do more of what worked, and less of what didn’t.

Now on behalf of Lani and myself, we wish you a wonderful, joyous, and prosperous New Year!

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 3:10 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.

Okay, it’s here. That special time on the calendar when we’re all scrambling with goals, resolutions, business strategies, marketing plans, or just being the contrarian and refusing to give into the New Year crazies with grand aplomb.

Now, a lot of us don’t have the time or the energy to revamp our entire 10-Year Vision Statement, change our business model, or invent a new product or service that’s sure to launch our annual income into the Seven Figure Club. But if all you’re looking for is a quick ‘n beefy emotional boost to prod you into a successful mindset for 2008, Yahoo! Hot Jobs contributor Caroline Levchuck has written the article for you:

Movies to Inspire Your Career Goals

I gotta say, I categorically agree with her on all 10 of her recommendations. But the coolest thing about recommending Caroline’s article is that I found it (or rather, Allen found it) organically, and showed it to me. And as this funky life happens, I know Caroline. In fact, she gave me one of my first big, ongoing freelance writing gigs way back at the turn of the century, when she was working on various creative projects in NYC at the cutting edge of Internet revolution, before the bust.
What’s more, I just hung out with Caroline in the Big Apple earlier this year, when I went to cheer on my dear friend, Lisa “The Relationship Journalist” Steadman and the big launch of her first book, It’s a BreakUP, Not a Breakdown. Caroline was wayyyy kind and groovy enough to invite us to dine at The French Culinary Institute of New York City. Yum! Caroline was a student there at the time, and gave us the behind-the-scenes tour of the school, just before the extraordinary five-star dinner. In that itty bitty pic I just borrowed from Lisa’s blog post, Caroline’s on the left (then Lisa, me, and our friend Annette.).

Thanks, Caroline - for dinner AND the great movie recommendations.

“Rooooh-deee!! Rooooh-deee! Rooooh-deee!”

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 29th, 2007 at 7:56 am and is filed under Microenterprises R Us, Mood Boosters. 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.

Trackbacking is one of 10 “inbound link strategies” flagged by Acorn Creative’s Kevin Skarritt as vital to increasing your online visibility and cuddle up with search engines. (Not hip to trackbacking? There’s a tutorial here, and the always helpful Wikipedia has good info on it as well.)

In fact, we’re creating our own trackback on his site with this post, because we not only think his post is the bee’s knees when it comes to getting links, we also think it’s relevant to the “A-Ha!”

All 10 of his strategies require you to create content (however long or short it may need to be), and all of them are ways to “A-Ha Yourself!” - to put your best and boldest ideas out there, and share your passion with the people who need to hear about it.

Wanna learn about the other 9? Head over to the Nuts & Bolts of Brand Blog to check them out!

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!". 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.

Kevin Skarritt. Archetype branding guru. Social media revolutionary. Former world record holder in pogo-sticking. Web design prophet. The Grand Poobah of user interfaces. A classically trained mime. Marketing uber-maven. Radical public speaker and fearless thought leader. Proud member of the Rotary Club, the Laconia-Weirs Chamber of Commerce, and multiple Real Estate Investor Associations.

These little bullet points may sketch out for you the kind of modern-day Renaissance man our good friend and strategic business ally Kevin Skarritt is. So perhaps it shouldn’t have been too surprising to go to a local parade on a lovely Sunday afternoon, and what to our wondering eyes should appear?

Yes, that’s right: Boy Scout leader Kevin Skarritt. On four-foot stilts. That he learned how to use just an hour before these photos were taken.

Kevin Skarritt. He’s not only a brand expert, he’s an expert in learning how to “A-Ha Yourself!” in myriad ways!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 11:07 am and is filed under How do you "A-Ha Yourself"?. 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 came up in conversation the other day - the question about how you qualify your prospects. And since not everyone in the room knew what that meant, I’ll explain briefly here for those reading: To qualify is to make sure a prospect actually fits in your target market, and has a need that you can fill with what you offer.

Usually, when the sales gurus talk about qualifying, they mean that you should be asking the right set of questions to determine whether the person in front of you is a legitimate prospect.

But what about your website? You can’t be there 24/7, so your content has to serve in your qualifying capacity, right?

Well, the “Aha moment” I had about websites is that web surfers - unlike the people you meet face-to-face - are waaaay more willing to meet you halfway.

After all, if they’re online, they’re searching for information. They have something specific in mind, and they want to know whether you can meet their needs. In other words, your online prospects are actively trying to qualify themselves for you.

Web searchers don’t want to be wasting their time when they’re on the prowl for a solution. They’re actively trying to figure out whether they belong in your market. And that’s huge! They’re making it so much easier on you than if you were speaking to them in person, sending direct mail, et cetera, et cetera.

And if you don’t have a website already? Oh boy, are you missing out. Earlier this year, we wanted to paint our new office, and Lani went online to find a local painter. She said, “I’ll give my business to the first Lakes Region painter I can find online.”

She couldn’t find a single one, so we painted the office ourselves. My brother-in-law nearly fell 15 feet off a ladder during the process, but that’s another story.

Please, please, if you’re not online, then get there as fast as you can, and make sure anyone who reads your website comes away knowing whether they’re supposed to be buying from you. Even if they decide not to, that’s okay - that’s a separate issue. Get ‘em there and get ‘em to qualify themselves first.

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 1:57 am and is filed under A-Has in the Ether. 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.