Marketing

Before I forget (mostly) everything I've learned, screwed up, experienced, and done in my career, I might as well start with work-related stuff. Hence the topic of my very first blog: Marketing.

It's not rocket science or brain surgery no matter what anyone tells you. Sure, like most things Marketing has changed significantly over the past decade or so -- you know, due to major advances in technology, data gathering and analysis, artificial intelligence, etc. Before that it was always evolving but perhaps not changing quite as quickly.

The basics, for me at least, were always a combination of creativity, tactics, and strategy. And here's how I've come to think of it after being immersed from 1998-2024 (applying one of my most important rules of marketing: The Rule of 3):

1. WHO do you want to reach/wants to know about what you have to offer? (I guess this would be your Target Audience).
2. WHAT do you want to say to them/what do they want to hear/need or want? (Um, your Value Proposition).
3. HOW can you reach them most effectively (usually, for most of us anyway, with a limited set of resources, i.e., time, people, and money). (Your Marketing Strategy/Plan).

I don't think #1 is that complicated if you know what you're doing and have done some research. Sometimes you have to be careful and thoughtful about defining who you want to reach as they may be fragmented into several audiences. For example, when I worked in higher education, marketing an undergraduate education at times involved targeting both prospective students and their parents, with the need to define personas for each to refine messaging based on similarities/differences. There are dozens of similar use cases I'm sure. And there are so many differentiators (think, geography, income, gender, etc) that can be applied to further segment a target audience that paralysis by analysis can occur.

What you want to say/what they want to hear...well, that's up to you to figure out. This is where the creativity noted above can really make a difference. Oh yeah, I guess market research can help with this as well via internal/external interviews, surveys, focus groups, and the like. 

As for #3, good luck. Long gone are the days of monolithic, easy to define channels. Instead, you will have to think carefully about which platforms to use (and how to spread your time, people, and money across them). The Google vs. Meta (or both)? Instagram vs Snap. LinkedIn? TikTok vs. everything else? And what I just typed will be obsolete within 10 minutes anyway, with new platforms emerging. Fragmentation is here to stay so expect this to be an exponential thing moving forward. 

But all hope is not lost. Apply fundamental thinking to what you're doing and the way forward will be clear. Just please don't get distracted by every shiny object you see. Focus and long-term discipline along with creativity and good strategy that leverage some (or most if you have the resources) of the available channels and technology will equal success.

"A good/very good marketing plan that is executed well is better than a perfect marketing plan that is never executed/executed poorly." Along with "The Rule of 3," this is your mantra.

What defines a good marketing plan, you ask? There are books and blogs and websites and artificial intelligence and alien creatures circling the solar system to provide (and overwhelm) you with robust answers to your question. I will not waste your time. What I will say is this....

ANALYZE things -- target audience(s), data, market research, key trends, competitive landscape, pricing, blah blah blah -- for as much time as you can reasonably afford (and do it well ahead of time, please, which I know is almost always impossible due to other people in the "business" asking you for the marketing plan within a few days/weeks for the imminent and at times ill-conceived "launch" of x, y, or z). This includes looking at available data and research, generating your own if you have the resources, and sifting through it all somewhat systematically to define many things related to 1, 2, and 3 above. Do not get paralyzed by analysis. Cut your losses when you run out of time and trust that if you've done your analysis you'll have what you need.

THINK about what you've come up with for a bit please. It won't all make sense or follow the same trends or patterns in a simple way (unless you are lucky). But do not skip over using your non-artificial brain for one of it's most important intended purposes.

So analyze first, then think about everything for a bit. Your plan is 25% done. Congratulations.

"Only 25 percent!", you gasp, "WTF?!" 

Yes, sorry, but it's true. All those fancy sections of your marketing plan entitled "Executive Summary," "Strategic Objectives," "Competitive Analysis," "Market Research," "Target Audience(s)," and so on, with nice colorful pie charts, "SEO/SEM" and "AI" sprinkled in here and there, and fancy tables filled with data, mean absolutely NOTHING at this point. Well, maybe not nothing. They mean you've done some ANALYZING and THINKING and will enable you to show off such in a glitzy presentation to anyone who is interested, e.g., "upper management", "internal or external clients/stakeholders," "the business," and even "your boss." 

Remember your mantra please: "A good/very good marketing plan that is executed well is better than a perfect marketing plan that is never executed/executed poorly." 

"Yes, I know, I know", you say with more than a hint of exasperation in your voice. But remember you haven't done anything yet, meaning nothing's been executed. So your plan sucks so far by any measure, mine or yours.

To DO, take the analyzing and thinking and structure them into the most important section of your plan: TACTICS. This is usually painful and tedious as you will have to define every item, action, deliverable, piece of content, etc. that needs to be created and deployed across "multiple channels and platforms." And, in today's world almost all of it will be digital in nature: ads, video content, social media ads/posts/contents/influencers, yada, yada, yada. 

Oh, and you need to determine how much money you can spend on everything you want to do daily, weekly, monthly, and annually to stay within your budget (which, unless you work for some giant corporate Borg, is NEVER enough or properly allocated based on what you're being asked to do). Stop complaining about it and get over it. It is what it is.

Once you've defined your tactics, your work is ready to be done. So start working, or delegating, or hiring a marketing agency to help you. Whatever it takes, please just execute your tactics (that were defined after some good analysis and thinking), with conviction and discipline.

Sure you have your trusty little AI robot/cyborg/widget to spit out tons of nice content and whatever else you need in seconds. So that's good. Come to think of it, AI can probably do everything I just manually wrote about for an hour in like .72 seconds, meaning you just say "Hey AI, write me a holistic, multi-channel marketing plan for selling moon rockets to aliens," and it's done. 

So you better start looking for another job I guess and stop wasting your time reading my blog.