Is Your Marketing thin?

I recently stumbled across this cartoon, and it reminded me of how marketing works for far too many brands. As you read this post, think about what any building would be without a blue print for success. It may look just like the one in the cartoon.

Is Your Marketing thin?

Remember, just because something looks promising from the outside, doesn’t mean that’s what’s actually happening. Activity, and lots of it, that’s what almost everyone seems to want to see. It’s like “ok, if we’re doing something, we must be marketing.”

Don’t get me wrong, activity (E-mailing, SEO, Social Media, Radio, Television, Trade Shows, you name it) has to happen. Ideas alone will not suffice. However, taking the time to build the blue print is crucial to successful marketing, and thus, a successful brand. I look at it in a somewhat simple, three-step process: Vision – Action – Results.

What’s interesting is that even people who know better will get caught up in the “busy-busy” mentality and waste precious time and money because they didn’t invest the proper time and money in planning. Just this past Friday, I met with a good friend who preaches, “know your outcome before you take action. You can measure against something if you don’t even know what that something is.” Yet he was telling me during our conversation about all this marketing activity, how it wasn’t working, and how much time and money he’d lost in the process. When I asked him how much time and money he invested in “knowing his outcome and what his metrics for success were, he just gave me that look. He knew right then that his marketing was “thin” because he hadn’t taken the proper time to plan, to build that blue print.

Think about how much time and money you are wasting by not investing the proper amount of time and money into planning. Really look into it. Understand that investing in the planning phase, even though there many be no outward “activity,” you are doing more to ensure that the dollars you spend in the tactical implementation will provide greater and more long-term return.

Now, the next time your faced with the prospect of investing time and money in planning and you hear, “we’re going to need 30 to 60 days to gather information, analyze, and plan, and it’s going to take $x to make it happen, think twice about complaining. Understanding that the more you invest in the planning and idea development phases, the less you’ll spend (or at least more efficiently spend) on the tactical side of the program.

Look at the cartoon again and ask yourself it that’s what you really want your brand and marketing to be.