Marketing Is a System, Not an Event

Marketing Is a System, Not an Event
By John Jantsch

Small business marketers love the chase. Love the new fangled
way to make the phone ring. They love to think of a marketing
promotion as a single event. But it’s precisely this view of
marketing that holds most small businesses back. They fall
prey to the “marketing idea of the week” and never fully
explore what it takes to create and build a completely
functioning, consistently performing, marketing system.

In this article I am going to outline the basic steps that any
business can follow on the way to creating their very own
marketing system. But first let’s explore this word system in
the context of marketing. Small business owners have no
problem thinking systems when it comes to say, accounting or
hiring. When it comes to marketing though, all bets are off.
It’s as if they are waiting for magic fairy dust to fall upon
them with the next great marketing innovation.

Look, effective marketing is little more than creating and
operating an effective marketing system. Now, when I use the
word system I mean several things. 1) The system is documented
– You can’t have a system or a step in a system unless you
write it down. 2) The system is built on sound marketing
principals and 3) You constantly measure, innovate, and refine
the system.

Okay, so on to the system building steps.

1) Narrow and define a target market – Small business owners
love to say yes. “Sure we can do that.” The next thing you
know the target market is roughly anyone they think will pay
them. You must commit to a narrowly defined target market and
you must focus all of your attention upon serving that market
like no one ever dreamed of. A narrow marketing focus might be
– Estate Attorneys - as opposed to Law Firms.

2) Discover and communicate a core message for that market –
Until you can show how your firm is different and offers
something unique, you will always compete on price. You must
find a way to tell your newly defined narrow target market why
you have something to offer that they value. Your core message
might be – We show estate attorneys how gain all of the
business they can handle - as opposed to: We help law firms.

3) Develop multiple forms of permission based lead generation –
No one like to be sold to and more and more advertising is
falling on numb ears and eyes. Your lead generation system
must be built on several fronts, such as public relations,
referral marketing, strategic partnerships, and targeted
advertising. Your lead generation message must offer the
target market a reason to want to know more. Forget about the
sale, look for ways to build trust.

4) Construct a lead conversion and customer reselling process –
No amount of leads in the world will help your business if you
don’t efficiently turn those leads into clients. You must have
a plan that maps out what you will do when phone rings, when
you make the sales call and when it’s time to do more business
with the clients you already have. Most small businesses
completely ignore this aspect of their marketing, but this is
where the real success in marketing lies.

5) Create educational based marketing and presentation
materials – Forget about the glossy sales brochure, use your
marketing materials to teach how your firm is different, how
you solve real problems, how you work, why you work, what you
believe and your marketing will be much more successful. Your
web site must come from this point of view as well.

6) Define the most important marketing success indicators –
Setting marketing goals for such things as leads,
appointments, sales, phone calls, referrals, impressions,
mentions and anything else you can think to measure is how you
turn marketing into a game and how you keep score of the game.
Everyone loves and game and the only way to improve something
is to measure how well you are doing in the first place.

7) Build an annual marketing calendar and budget and stick to
it – Once you have spent the time and energy to think through
steps 1-6 you need to commit your plan to a marketing calendar
and then allocate (or at least think about) the money it will
take to implement your plan. Once you create a calendar it is
much more likely that you will look at the tasks assigned to
each month like a “to-do” list. So, instead of whining that
you should do more marketing, you simply scratch each item off
your list and plan for the next. It’s an amazingly simple but
effective device.

Okay…now the last bit of advice.

Every system needs a champion. Either find someone in your
organization who does little else but operate the system or
hire a marketing professional and charge them with helping you
develop, implement and run the system.

Properly fed and maintained, this little marketing system can
become the engine that drives your firm’s climb to the top.

Paul White is a 42 year old former teacher. He now helps people
all around the world to become wealthy online. Whatever you
are selling, visit the popular site: http://www.profitmountain.
com (http://www.profitmountain.com) and if you subscribe to
Profit Mountain`s FREE wealth building newsletter, you will
also receive FREE advertising for the next 12 months! (Worth
$200!) as well as loads of other things!