Shot from the hip marketing only gets you so far. Yes, you need to be nimble in order to take advantage of the wide range of marketing opportunities available to you today. However, you will always feel like you are running in circles if you do not have a marketing plan serving as your foundation to basic day to day marketing activities. Not only is this approach ineffective, it is also completely exhausting. Greatness rarely falls in one’s lap. The best of the best start with a plan.
You are a brand in your own right. Every action you take and in every word you say you tell the rest of us something about your brand. What is your personal brand saying now?
When you meet an executive or owner of a business, ask them to tell you their mission, then their vision. Did you notice anything? Maybe it felt clunky, confusing, a bit off, or somewhat pointless. Better yet, let’s take a shot at your company’s words on that wall. Start by simply defining the terms vision and mission. This exercise alone should not be difficult. In fact if it is, then living your vision and mission will be awfully hard across your organization.
As desert play within the renowned Burning Man event continues to jump into trending mainstream awareness, you may be surprised at what this booming culture of a non-culture actually means to its growing masses. There are 10 Principles of Burning Man that guide one’s experience built upon this once barren landscape. Believe it or not, marketing is not invited to the party. Not even in the form of unintentionally dawning a brand logo-ed t-shirt. So, how does a self-sustaining community look without marketing?
There is a creative bone in everyone’s body. Some are just better than others at cultivating it. Creativity can be nurtured. Best of all, the right creativity creates the right results. Here are some simple ways you can put your creative mind to work for your business’s marketing efforts.
Every penny counts when running a business. However, penny pinching can hurt though if you skimp in the wrong places. Here are some great free marketing tools that provide you with value, utility, and an opportunity to test them out and see if you want to move on up to a paid version to get more bang out of your buck.
Being a business leader is a full time job. In a small business or start up, you have some level of understanding in every discipline it takes to run that business: accounting,administration, human resources, sales, marketing, and so on. What most “manage” to do is focus on the most immediate need first or what one enjoys most, while the rest of what needs to get done suffers. If growing your business is a priority, you can not do this with sales or marketing.
When you are a marketer, you can never turn off your mind even when on vacation in Croatia. Every place you go you see ways businesses, from the shops to the street vendors, could be doing things a bit differently to generate more sales. Surprisingly, you also find is what many of us have forgotten in the digitally drenched world of the United States.
Your business is clicking along. You have enough business that you are not in excruciating pain, but you aren’t living on easy street either. When you are in this place you are working extremely hard. You’ve set a good pace with a lingering concern about how long you can maintain it. This is wear I typically ask you, “Do you know where your sweet spot is for business growth?”
Being halfway through the year is just a fact of life, but how much closer are you to achieving your end of year goals? Do you even know?
If you are still sitting there trying to address these questions then chances are your current position over all is confusing. This is mostly because the goals you set at the beginning of the year had one or more of the following issues:
