By Neville Pokroy
Whenever I speak to people about marketing their businesses, the first question I always ask is: “How many ways are there to market your business?” Or, “How many marketing tactics are there?” My next question is: “How many have you tried?”
Inevitably, the number mentioned is approximately five to ten different tactics. And the number most people have tried is around four to six. 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 over 150 tactics—mind boggling, isn’t it?
So, you may ask, if that is true, how on earth does the average business person decide which 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 which marketing tactics to use?” If you can only think of a handful of tactics (and they are probably the most common ones 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 answers and try, instead, to ask more questions. The answers to those questions will often give rise to new and innovative tactics that you have never considered before. Finding the right questions to ask becomes the key to your success.
As far as the second question 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 is also addressed as part of the questioning and via setting proper goals and objectives for the organization.
This process of questioning can be considered “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 need some help. The process requires some handholding, but the benefits are far-reaching.
Think about this—If you feel that you have not maximized the marketing opportunities available to your company, you should start asking more questions. Relevant questions. Questions that will cause 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.
Article by Neville Pokroy, Marketing Partner at Mastermind Solutions Inc. Mastermind Solutions Inc. is a company that delivers top line revenue growth, higher profits, satisfied customers, motivated staff and lower operating costs. As a full-service marketing company, our multifaceted and fully integrated marketing services deliver additional sales and sustainable business growth to clients of all sizes. Contact Neville at neville@mastermindsolutions.ca or visit the website at http://www.mastermindsolutions.ca/
