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A Battle Between Corporate Marketing & Entrepreneurial Marketing

With a foot in both worlds… I have seen how small to medium size businesses do online marketing… and I have seen how independent online marketers do it.

They are often battling for the same customer.

And I have to say that there is no clear winner of what works best.

But both can certainly learn a lot from each other.

In SMEs it goes something like this:

Bright spark Marketing Manager finds a new fandangled idea or software. If he could only convince the Director, or find a way to justify the added expense on this quarters… or even this years budget. Through the touchy approval process he runs the gauntlet and after 1 or 2 weeks, hopefully, he may have approval for that 1 new piece of kit or subscription.

Now of course, the Director who approved the purchase order wants to know what ROI they are already getting by next week. Until such can be substantiated, the poor marketing manager couldn’t dream of requested approval for another software application, no matter if it’s better or more up to date.

Meanwhile, the independent online marketer has been using that piece of kit since it was offerred at a discount price when it first launched 6 months ago. He understands that it’s just one tool out of many that he must juggle to achieve the right balance of inlinking, social buzz, lead generation funnel, etc. So when he sees a new shiny service or system, he goes for it. He buys it on the spot with his paypal account or credit card and takes it for a test drive.

The marketing manager must work very hard to create sufficient flexibility in the yearly marketing budget for new services, software, programs or subscriptions.

The online marketer must learn to validate each purchase, through tracking money and time invested with an effort to measure the success of each tactic.

Get the strategic internet marketing super-tips.

Minimise Your Marketing – For Maximum Punch

You’ve got budget.

You’ve got projects.

You’ve got targets.

You’ve got… a huge pain in the butt.

Marketing Management is not for the feint of heart, is it?

Those baffoons in higher management really have no way of comparing a lead-generating social media marketing program from a creative brand advertising campaign.

But they sure know how to put on the pressure.

Actually, I don’t think you should be so hard on senior management.

There is a way to make them giddily happy with your marketing performance, whilst educating them under-the-radar super quickly so that they actually support the growth of marketing in all directions.

The key is minimalism.

And that’s YOUR responsibility.

Look, if you have 7 marketing projects, each takes 2 months to complete, and you’re working on all of them, it’s going to be months and months before ANY of them complete, right?

But if you could laser focus onto just 2 projects, you’ll be enjoying the performance results of marketing projects much much sooner.

How do you ‘laser focus’ your marketing project selection?

Create an integrated marketing road-map – that’s how.

Marketing Minimalism

Squeeze out enough space on your daily schedule that you can plan. Stop chasing your tail.

Planning for prioritization and resource allocation is what differentiates the drowning marketer from the promoted marketer.

I learned that the hard way.

You’ve got to fight your corner, because you know best. But you have to present your case well.

  • Start from your USP (a cross-over between your core competencies, business strategy, current product portfolio, and competitive positioning).
  • Extend to your target audience.
  • Capture your ideal prospects profile.
  • Discover where they hang out.
  • Consider what value proposition would attract their interest.
  • Build a promotional pipeline.
  • Open the floodgates of traffic getting one-at-a-carefully-selected-time.

Select the projects that will leverage and lift your genuine current marketing bottleneck.

Want help with any of it?

I have a network of contractors I can recommend. I am also sometimes available to help with campaign planning, and also direct response copywriting (my first passion in marketing).

See my Copywriter For Hire page for more or download my white paper ‘how to select your next copywriter’.

Business Development Success Matrix

  1. Preparation – Your personal and career success strategy.

  2. Research – Market, competitor, company, product, customer research.

  3. Development – Team, process, product, market presence, etc..
  4. Conversion – Strategic marketing campaigns and copywriting for customer acquisition, retention and lifetime value.
  5. Traffic – search, social media, partnerships, direct marketing and more.
  6. Tracking – Performance measurement for ongoing improvement.

Theory Of Constraints Marketing

If total control of professional marketing management is important to you…

…this article will send you head first through the rabbit hole into the wonderland of iron-grip strategic marketing control.

In fact, this just might be the greatest secret in the marketing industry.

I stumbled across this only because of my fascination of systems thinking, logic, and mind-mapping (although this is not about mind-mapping).

Stay tuned to the most important updates on generating demand in the experience economy as it is published.