[Jo wrote this article for ITWeb, published there this week.]
I see it time and again. A mid-sized company, say 20-30 staff, decides they want to start doing some marketing, or they’d like to refresh their current activities. They get all excited about it and have a lot of fun doing the cool things, like rebranding, or launching a new website. They may even have put a great strategy and implementation plan in place. But after a few of months, it’s all fizzled out.
The biggest mistake these companies make is that they don’t stick to their marketing plan.
By doing this, companies effectively waste a great deal of their initial marketing investment. If that fantastic new website hasn’t been updated in months, your clients might wonder if you are still in business. That wonderful new branding is lovely but not particularly effective if correspondence is still going out with the old logo on it.
Effective marketing is consistent, regular and ongoing. Sporadic bursts of activity are likely to be a waste of time – and may end up doing your company more harm than good. It’s not a great impression when you don’t even follow up the first of your new ‘monthly’ email newsletters.
Why does this happen?
- Times get tough. You may have thought you had R50K/month for your marketing, but out of the blue, the economy tanks or the exchange rate plummets and you’re scrambling to pay salaries, let alone SEO bills.
- Times get good. Conversely, companies who are very busy tend to (naturally) prioritise servicing their clients, and updating their blog or issuing a press release takes a back seat to paid work.
- Companies lose interest. The glamorous part is the new brand identity, the funky website or the launch event. It’s harder to get excited about finding something to write regular press releases about, or content for the newsletter. It’s harder still when your company’s expertise is in tech, medicine or finance – where marketing is practically a different language.
- Nobody is assigned accountable ownership. The reality is that unless you have a dedicated staff member whose performance is judged on whether this gets done, it probably won’t happen.
- Resources weren’t properly allocated. The assigned staff member may not actually have the time or skills to devote to getting everything done. And if the work is outsourced, there’s usually not enough awareness that someone internally still needs to allocate time to sourcing rough materials or checking and signing off work.
- There are no instant results. Building a brand takes time and when sales don’t spike immediately, companies can be quick to dismiss their marketing efforts as ineffective.
How you can avoid marketing meltdown
- Budget for a ‘bare basics’ plan. Identify an absolute minimum, core level of marketing activity that has to be sustained and make its budget untouchable. Suspending this should never be an option as it’s essentially cutting off the pipeline. You might stop active SEO on your site, but continue adding two blog posts a week, properly tagged and titled for the search engines. On top of this core activity, overlay your second tier (‘nice to have’) and third tier (‘if we have a bumper year’) activities to enhance and complement the core projects.
- Plan ahead. A company buys a press office on IT Web and is good about using it for the first few months – then… tumbleweeds. All of a sudden their contract’s nearly up and they still have three press releases to use. Cramming them into a month means people might start recognising their name but this can be undone when the company decides not to renew because, well, it didn’t get them any results. If they’d been more disciplined about planning for a monthly press release, I suspect the results would have been a lot better. You get the idea.
- Slow and steady wins the race. Accept that while it’s not all glamorous, marketing must be consistent in order to work. One way of keeping motivated to do the grind work is to benchmark and measure as many indicators as you can. Even seeing a steady increase in your Twitter followers or Facebook page fans can be motivating and proof that people are reading your updates.
- Make someone accountable. While the marketing plan needs to be committed to from the very top, ensuring it all happens needs to be built into the KPAs of whoever owns it internally. Or pay a marketing coach a retainer to keep you in line. Whether your team handles the work themselves or outsources it, it needs to be someone’s focus. Outsourcing gives you the extra reassurance that if the work doesn’t get done, the agency or consultant doesn’t get paid.
- Allocate sufficient resources. Make sure that you fully understand what support your marketing point person needs, in terms of time, budget and headcount. You’ll soon see whether they have the capacity to handle it all in-house, or whether elements must be outsourced.
And finally: be patient
Results will come. Search engine optimisation usually takes 6 months to have an effect. And marketers generally agree that it takes seven exposures to your brand before a customer is likely to engage with it.
In particular, if you are a new entrant into a market saturated with big brands, remember that it’s taken them a long time (and a lot of money!) to get where they are. So give it time. And factor in quarterly or bi-annual marketing reviews to assess what’s working and what isn’t.
