Friday, January 27, 2017

No More Random Marketing

Is your marketing team throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks?

Are you doing marketing without a plan? Are you more like waking up every morning, going with the flow, and creating marketing content based on your feelings or on your boss' surprise assignment? Are you normally executing marketing acts which need to be ready ASAP without a budget, without connection to the rest of your company strategy or without results measurement?

If your answer is YES, sorry but, you are just doing random marketing. Too much randomness is a recipe for a marketing disaster. 

Why We Do Random Marketing

Marketing offers us a lot of opportunities perhaps, too many to manage. If we mention the major social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, Snapchat, there is already (more than) enough room to create content. Sometimes, this can produce some pressure for the company to create "just something". Many companies are too worried about being everywhere. That is a problem itself.  Strategically thinking and planning can save you a lot of those worries (without mentioning the time and the resources).

Other companies, simply, have no resources to hire somebody to take care of marketing. In the worst of the case, a random person inside the organization needs to manage this when she/he has some extra time. So, they try their best and publish something here and there without a real connection. 

Random Marketing Success 
 
I cannot lie to you. Sometimes, an act of random marketing can get good results. For example, your video can get viral even if this is randomly made with a reduced budget. You can get more followers after a funny picture than after a well thought and prepared campaign. The sad part is that if a random act of marketing works, it might encourage your company to continue using those. This particularly happens when company focus, for example, more on followers than in treal lead generation. But, the (long term) truth is that going to one fair trade here and there, printing an expensive glossy brochure, publishing a LinkedIn post once a year and publishing a couple of new pictures on your website or on your Instagram when you remember, will take you nowhere. When we talk about long term branding and marketing, random is not the best way to go. 

Strategic Marketing Matters 

As in any relevant part of your business, to do marketing successfully you need to have a game plan.

The first step is defining what do you want to get from your marketing (e.g. visibility, increase sales, recognition). Later, you need to define your strategy. Instead of trying to figure out what to publish in each channel, use your time smartly and define where is worth sharing content and what kind of content is worth sharing.


Sometimes in marketing, less is more. No doubt, random marketing is one of these cases. You should give it a try.

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