The Plan Is Broken

Continuing in the vein of addressing common problems with fitting our old mentality and systems to the new marketing landscape, I got thinking about how we actually write a plan. How do you accurately plan and record all the individual interactions and conversations that make up the interactive or social part of the modern marketing plan? I mean you can't "schedule" taking part in a conversation can you?! Or can you?

You can if you initiate it! One of my newest team members was searching for information to use for a paper he wanted to write around his event but he couldn't find anything weighty enough on a particular subtopic. He posted a question to the relevant LinkedIn community and within an hour received 9 helpful responses.

Aside from finishing his paper more easily, he started a conversation with 9 people passionate enough about the subject matter to invest time in helping someone in their community learn. He "planned" to send them a copy of the finished content to say thanks. A couple of them asked about the event. A relationship was born and providing he continues to nurture it through "planned" interactions, he has created a handful of potential customers and advocates who were previously unaware of us and how we serve the needs of our market.

To a certain extent we have to roll with the punches in this new environment and accept that a lot of what we do will be reactive and we'll have to record it after the fact. Which raises a question I have often heard asked, do we need to record it? After all its just one short exchange with maybe one other person right? Wrong.

It is more important than ever to record these interactions because they are far more personal than the 10,000 piece direct mail shot of yesterday. Recipients of old-style communications for the most part knew they were mass volume and impersonal. Participants in our new marketing are just that, they are not passive and they are talking to you. Not a big faceless company, you personally. And they expect to be remembered.

Don't believe me? You must have met someone at some point (maybe at a party or other social gathering) who on second meeting can't remember the first and introduces themselves again. Maybe you were offended, maybe you just thought them a little stupid, but I guarantee you didn't think "wow this is someone I want to get know better and spend more time with".

So we shouldn't be looking at how to fit the new marketing into the plan, but how we can totally change the fundamentals of what we consider essential to a "plan" to fit with the new marketing. The plan is broken and there is no glue in the world that is going to put it back together again.

So many platforms, so little time!

 It came up in a conversation I was having today with a group I was training. The killer question.

"So with all these different channels and platforms and ways of interacting with people, how do we pick what to do so we get the results but don't have to sleep in the office?"

And I feel their pain, I really do!  However I reckon that it all has to come back to the basics. Just because the rules have changed that doesn't mean we jump the gun and forget the sound principles of good marketing that got us here in the first place. Not everything that worked in the old world works in the new one but these do:

Know where to find your people

Often cited as "fish where the fishes are", this is a no-brainer when it comes to focused and effective marketing activity. You have to identify which channels and platforms your customer is using.

That awesome YouTube video you did that still hasn't got any views recorded, that killer discussion you posted in that forum that no one responded to; are you sure, hand on heart that your target audience are definitely actively, regularly using that platform in significant numbers?

But I don't know for sure and I can't afford market research!

Well firstly, yes you can. There are loads of free profiling and surveying tools out there (you've heard of Google right? Yeh, it is that simple. Search and you shall find.) that enable you to engage your target audience in a cost effective, time economic way and find out what their typical behaviours are. Sure you might have to provide some sort of incentive in exchange for the information but what's a voucher or a bottle of bubbles compared to hours of your (no doubt pretty expensive) time spent getting it wrong?

The second point here is that you ought to be tracking the effectiveness of every activity rigorously so if you are getting it wrong, you can stop, pronto! Again there are lots of free analytics programmes and plug ins to help with this even if your senior management team don't want to shell out for a paid for solution.

So there's your answer. Don't do it all, do it right. You really don't have to be a genius to figure it out, you've got nothing to lose except the overtime.