How to Eat the Marketing Elephant: Part 1

Have you sat down to plan your businesses’ goals and strategies for the New Year yet? Are you excited by the thought of what you want to create, how much fun it will be and how much profit you’ll make?

Great! And once you switch out of being in your head with grand visions, and focus on the exact tactics, activities and tasks that are necessary to bring your vision to light, you may find yourself becoming a bit overwhelmed.

Okay – a LOT overwhelmed!

When thinking about how you’re going to market your business in the New Year, it can be exciting and relatively easy to form a big picture. You can envision the money, the success, the clients, the overall busyness you plan to experience and the profit that will result from that.

Yet when you think of the activities that are needed to make this vision a reality, and the multitude of details that go into making your vision a reality, a big whopping dose of overwhelm and reality can set in.

Here’s a short list of strategies and tactics you may be considering to market your business:

• Public relations
• Web site – new or upgraded
• Mobile web site
• Social media
• Copywriting
• Networking
• Blogging
• e-mail marketing
• Trade shows
• Videos
• Writing and publishing articles
• Building your database / list
• Search engine optimization
• Direct mailers / letters / postcards
• Sales strategies
• Teleseminars / Webinars / Podcasts / Training
• Freebies / Giveaways
• Electronic Products and Programs
• Branding
• Public Speaking

You might be asking yourself these questions:

Which of these marketing tactics should I implement this year? Which can wait until next year or beyond? How will they work together to leverage one other? Do I need them all? Which ones are most important? Which ones can I do on my own and which should I outsource? I have no idea how some of these items work, so how can I possibly know whether or not I should use them?

As you can see, overwhelm’s close cousins – confusion and paralysis – can easily move right in as permanent house guests once you start considering HOW you’ll create your big vision.

You do know the only way to eat an elephant don’t you? It’s one bite at a time of course. That’s what I’m going to help you do in the next few blog posts. We‘re going to take each of these marketing topics “one bite at a time” and:

1 – Examine the strategy behind it
2 – Discuss what it CAN do for your business and what it CANNOT do for your business
3 – Explain how it fits in with and leverages all your other marketing efforts
4 – Advise you on the pros and cons of outsourcing each particular tactic
5 – Provide you with the first few steps to implementing this tactic if you decide it fits in with your vision.

Remember, no marketing tactic is an island. They all must leverage one another AND all work together to achieve your overall vision and business strategy.

So, first we will start with the hub of it all – your website.

Read on to Part 2 . . .