Stop performing Random Acts of Marketing!!

Random Acts of Marketing (fight the urge!)

Ran·dom /ˈrandəm/ adjective — made, done, happening, or chosen without method or conscious decision.

Act /akt/ verb — take action; do something.

Mar·ket·ing /ˈmärkədiNG/ noun — the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising. Ran-dom acts of mar-ket-ing are short burst campaigns intended to advertise, promote and sell products or services without method or conscious decision. Simply put — running isolated tactics without a strategic plan. This is when you think and plan tactic-by-tactic and will limit your success and drive up your costs.

Breaking the short-term planning cycle 

You must break the cycle of tactic-BY-tactic planning and execution. I have heard it called “burst marketing” but whatever it’s called there’s a better way and it is tactic-TO-tactic. You will produced more value for your audience and optimize your return on marketing investment (ROMI).

To accomplish this you have to think in parallel and over as longer period of time. I suggest a minimum of 3 years. You will find that this forces you to be honest about where you are today, where you are heading and why and how you are planning to get there.

I have come to describe the approach as a rainbow. Think of the color bands of a rainbow and imagine a timeline of three years underneath it. Each color band should represent a go-to-market message, geography to be entered, new industry to be added. You would then commit to follow that band over the three year period. Once you have the color bands defined you would then start to establish leading performance indicators (LPIs) and key performance indicators (KPIs). These will flow up into your business’s goals.

Define the business objective and align goals 

A great place to start is to truthfully define your business’s objective. This is different than goals. Your goals will be owned by sales, marketing, product, geos, etc and must directly align to the business’s objective. Beneath your goals are the KPIs supported by LPIs.

Be careful as; profit, earnings per share, shareholder value, and the like are not objectives. Those would be goals and are important but differ from an objective because they don’t inspire a story arc of your brand to the world.

People buy from people and love a great story 

Every company has a story and a brand. I use brand here not as a logo and color code, I mean it is your company’s culture, people, process and technology that unite to deliver value to your customers. We tend to not consider our brand a part of demand generation activities. We usually associate branding with logos, business cards, golf shirts with the company name, signs, etc. In the digital age your brand is everywhere and attracts your audiences’ attention.

As your create awareness of your brand you should build credibility and trust, tell your audiences a compelling story that develops over time to which they can emotionally connect and they will keep coming back. How you do this is by honestly understand who is in your audience and wanting to bring them the

Where are you today? 

Think of the marketing your business does. Is it “by” or “to”? Does it integrated across all the possible channels? Are activities linked together like a chain? Are you measuring progress against baseline or hypothesis over a known amount of time?