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Whenever I speak to people about marketing their businesses there is one question that I always ask them: “How many ways are there to market your business?” OR, if said another way, “How many marketing tactics are there?” Then, the next question is: “How many have you tried?”
Inevitably, the number that is mentioned is approximately 5 – 10 different tactics. And the number that most people have tried is around 4 – 6. If that is your experience then you are part of the norm. If your experience is different with larger numbers, then you are part of a very unique, and very small, minority.
I recently spent some time documenting the number of marketing tactics I could identify. Some are traditional tactics, some are interactive tactics, while others are guerilla type tactics and the last group is “just common sense tactics”. Believe it or not, so far I have reached a count of 134 tactics – mind boggling, isn’t it?
So, you may ask, if that is true, how on earth does the average business person decide what tactics to use; and more importantly, how many should be used in a single year of marketing effort?
Let’s deal with the first question:
How do you decide what marketing tactics to use?
If you can only think of a handful of tactics (and they are probably the most common ones that are used by most people) then you are probably competing with your competitors in almost all spheres of marketing. By doing that, you may find it difficult to stand out from the crowd.
The solution is to identify tactics that are not necessarily commonly used and to bolster your marketing campaign with a range of these tactics. But the challenge still remains – what are my marketing tactic options?
The best way to develop this list is to step back from looking for the answers and to simply ask more questions. The answers to those questions will often give rise to new and exciting tactics that have never been considered by you before. It is finding the right questions to ask that then becomes the key to your success.
As far as the second questions is concerned:
How many should be used in a single year of marketing effort?
The answer to that question revolves around what is appropriate for the business and what is affordable. It also gets addressed as part of the questioning and via setting proper goals and objectives for the organization.
This process of questioning can be considered as Strategic Marketing – it is the key to the long-term health and success of your business, and it is not very complicated if you know how to go about it.
Unfortunately, if you don’t have a marketer with a strategic vision on your payroll, you may require some help. The process requires some handholding, but the benefits will be far reaching.
Think about this – if you feel that you have not maximized the marketing opportunities available to your company, then you should start asking more questions. Relevant questions. Questions, that will cause the opportunities to reveal themselves in some mystical and magical way. Actually, it’s not really mystical or magical – much of it is, in fact, just common sense marketing.
If you are interested to find out how I can help you ask the right marketing questions, please feel free to call me at (905)886-2235 or email me neville@mastermindsolutions.ca
Over the next few months I will discuss some of the marketing tactics you may not have considered. Not every tactic will be appropriate for your business; however every one will be worth considering, because that tactic may give rise to an alternative that may very well be worthwhile. Consider them all, and build on them. And by asking the correct questions you will create something that is so unique that it may enable you to break through the marketing clutter.
Marketing Tactic of the Month
Spend more time in contact with your customers – while this may seem obvious, many companies spend more time looking for new customers rather than nurturing the relationships with their existing customers. It is common knowledge that generating new customers is much more expensive than selling more to existing customers.
Some of the benefits for doing this are:
- Add-on selling;
- Making sure customers are happy;
- Finding out how customers’ needs are changing so that you can develop new products and services for them – they are your best resource for new ideas, and they are likely to be very helpful to you if you can assure them that they will become the ultimate beneficiary.
Click here to find out more about our Strategic Marketing process
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