Integrated Marketing

17 Jan

Posted at 07:22h in Integrated Marketing, Small Business by
Don't feel dumb if you ask this question. We took a few weeks in my masters program at WVU to dive into this very question. In marketing, almost everything is squishy and this is probably the squishiest part. I bopped around my favorite sites and didn't find anyone with a really concrete definition of "strategy" vs "tactic" (even the dictionary is pretty ambiguous) so let's work with this one: 

09 Jan

Posted at 06:51h in Integrated Marketing, Management Mondays by
It's January 9th and I'm having a hard time believing that it's been over a month since I asked you to create your "best tactics" list.  CRA-ZEE how time flies during the holidays. So, did you do it? Have you trashed any old things that you really couldn't tell were creating customers or revenue for you? Wondering why the hell I asked you to do that and never followed up? It's really hard to focus on strategy when you're juggling a million things a day. But you have to. Sometimes it's just easier to review the tactics that worked and build your strategy from the ground up, then pull strategies out of thin air. The purpose of this exercise is to look at the tactics that worked and decide on the overall strategy these tactics contribute to. THEN you can brainstorm more tactics that fit into that strategy. Thereby giving you a much more targeted approach that has a higher likelihood of success. 

05 Dec

Posted at 08:45h in Integrated Marketing, Management Mondays by
I have noticed that a lot of us are pretty polarized when it comes to our marketing efforts. We are way too impatient to see results from new marketing tactics, and often don't measure the old ones effectively to make sure they're still working.  As I mentioned a couple weeks back, you have to look back objectively at the past year before you can accurately plan for the next. To help you do that, I've created some questions to ask yourself about the sales and marketing you've done in 2011.

17 Nov

Posted at 08:09h in Integrated Marketing by
We're on the wind down to the end of the year, and so I'm going to write more about taking stock of your past year - successes and failures - to create a great marketing and pr plan for 2012. A very smart marketing consultant once told me that it's impossible to decide where you're going, until you know where you've been. But as small business owners and entrepreneurs it can be painful to look back...because we're so damn hard on ourselves. Yet if I don't look back, how do I incorporate all the lessons I've learned, including the hard ones, into my plans for the coming year?