Create Your Marketing Machine to Plan for Marketing Success
The answer to push-and-pray marketing is to plan your marketing in advance: to sit down and create a Marketing Machine so that your marketing runs smoothly and effortlessly all year long. Creating a year-round plan for marketing can really improve the number of sales that you’ll be able to make, and keep a steady stream of clients and income coming in. There are several things to consider when creating your Marketing Machine:
Consistency and repetition are two of the most important things to planning your marketing. Experts say that you have to make 6 to 12 “first” impressions on a potential client before you’ll be remembered. So make sure to set up your Marketing Machine to include many marketing pieces per year, evenly distributed throughout the year (see “Timing,” below) and presented in many different ways (see “Format,” below).
You should also make sure to have consistent and repetitive copy and design elements throughout your materials. Using some of the same text selling points across all of your marketing materials helps increase memorability. And making sure the look-and-feel of your materials is also consistent, with a well-designed and well-established Visual Vocabulary, will make the pieces of your Marketing Machine look like a well-planned, professional, and unified set, instead of a disjointed mess, just slapped together.
Format is the way that you’re delivering your marketing materials. Marketing can be presented in many formats:
• Printed materials, like stationery, brochures, postcards, and datasheets
• Online materials, like http://Digestmark.com your website
• Digital materials, like Word templates, email signatures, and PDF files
• Written materials, like articles and press release
• Meeting and presentation materials, like PowerPoint presentations, presentation folders, proposal covers, and leave-behind materials like brochures or other marketing pieces.
• Follow-up materials, like eZines or online newsletters, offline newsletters, sales letters, and thank-you cardsIt’s important to match the media that you’re marketing in to your target audience to get great results from your Marketing Machine.
For example, if your audience is highly technical, marketing online is probably a good idea. But if you’re selling to people who rarely use computers, printed media would be a better direction to take.
