Why do we attend industry conferences? To see and be seen, to be part of the industry camaraderie, and if we’re being honest, to take advantage of a few days in sunny Florida.
If you’re lucky, you walk away with a few nuggets of information that you could apply to your everyday business and a fistful of potential clients. But, in order to get there, you have to do the work.
One primary concern of nonprofit organizations is budget. There’s not always a lot of money to dedicate to comprehensive marketing campaigns. But, these organizations are uniquely positioned to benefit from email marketing thanks to its comparatively low cost.
Very few people have the luxury of being a totally free spirit… although wouldn’t that be fun? Most of us need structure and planning to get through the day—and to be able to (hopefully) cross a ton of stuff off the always-growing to-do list.
In marketing, building structure and strategy isn’t a fully linear process (as much as we’d like that to be true). Things come up that force reassessment, redirection. That said, there are key steps that can help make creating strategy a more efficient and effective exercise.
As a marketing agency, we are infinitely aware of the value our services hold. That’s not meant to be boastful or self-serving, it’s simply the core of what we do. A company who sells widgets is an expert in that item. We may not know how to manufacture it, but we do have the expertise to help get it sold.
Now, that company may already have an in-house marketing department. Why would they—or should they—work with us? Because of these two most important (and yes, non-sexy) reasons: time and money.
Ilene and I recently attended an event that matched us with companies who had identified and expressed varying needs or holes in their marketing efforts. It was modeled against from a speed dating scenario, where we had a set amount of time to chat with each company representative and engage in a mutual exchange of “We need this” and “Here’s how we [White Space] can help.”
It was a long, full day but a good exercise in exploring different industries and corporate personalities. We also got a view of how companies perceive us, as an agency, and what that may mean to an entity that already has in-house marketing.
Every marketer knows that strategy is necessary for effective execution, but oftentimes we get that deer-in-the-headlights look when it’s time to get down to business. . This hesitation isn’t necessarily rooted in fear. Rather, key players become anxious thinking about all the “stuff” that accompanies the strategic process—so much so that the process gets marginalized.
In last week’s blog I discussed why prioritization is so important for progress and why it’s so much more than just picking your battles. There is a method to the madness.
Unfortunately, gaining a clear understanding as to why one action ranks over another is oftentimes tricky. Anyone who has felt inundated with work, life, relationships knows this firsthand. It takes a little work to determine an order of prioritization, but it can be done.
Death, taxes, and a 9:30 a.m. Uberconference call with Ilene every Monday through Friday--these are the certainties in my life.
I requested this call about three years ago. We had started to get busy enough where she was handling one end of the company and I was handling the other. A bad habit of skimping on communication meant, at best, gaps between the two of us. At worst, it meant holes is client interactions. So, this became our morning huddle and our time to find out what was on each other’s dockets.
I’m forced to prioritize daily—and many times throughout the day. My daily routine actually starts the night before when I put my workout clothes next to my bed (wishful thinking!). If I make the girls shower at night, that’s 10 or 15 extra minutes the next morning… so, let’s do that.
Once they’re on the bus to school, there’s no more hiding from the beastly inbox of things waiting to be addressed. Sometimes that’s not so simple to determine what comes first. The same applies to business and marketing. You know certain pieces of strategy are more pressing than others, but how do you select, definitively, the order in which they rank?
When asked how I define my role at White Space, I like to say that I take Ilene and Adrianne’s good thinking and strategic planning and bring it to life with our team’s tactical execution. Admittedly, I’m not particularly patient. I’ve been on mind-numbing internal phone calls where these two were debating if something was a strategy or a goal.
As badly as I want to get to the tactics, wading through the strategic process is an important step. Plotting out marketing scenarios in the beginning makes for better, more actionable decisions in the future.
