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Do You Embrace Randomness in Your Marketing?



Whether nonprofit or for profit, so often when I’m at a general business gathering and an executive finds out I’m a marketing business consultant and coach I get cornered for some quick advice.  The common thread is they tried everything in marketing and are perplexed as to why they are not seeing the marketing results they expected.  That’s followed by the inevitable question ‘What do you think I should do?”   Always forgetting to bring along my marketing crystal ball for situations like this, all I can do is come back with questions to dive deeper into the problem in the few free minutes I have.

Often the answer is ‘we have tried everything but nothing is working’.  Marketing is a very broad, varied and often expensive discipline, so I ask them what have they tried.   Usually it’s some marketing tactic that isn’t aligned to their business audience and does not have a strategy or plan to support the goals of the audience or the business.   I love it when they insist they are using social media just like someone told them to do without really understanding why or how.   If they were really doing ‘everything’, they are likely spreading themselves way too thin and don’t really know where to start.   Marketing tactics in today’s digital world abound, and if you’re spreading yourself too thin without a focus, you’re likely falling into that trap of random acts of marketing.   Whether you’re for profit, not for profit or nonprofit, that’s expensive. 

Maybe this happened to you?  Or worse yet – perhaps you were the instigator?   Often in a business meeting with the management team there is a comment made about sales not meeting expectations. 
And then, the room opens up with a litany of marketing ideas.  Suddenly everyone is a marketing expert and too often there isn’t a real one in the room.  We need a new brochure, our logo is killing us, lets run some advertisements, we need to do social media, lets run a sale, we need to do more trade shows, let’s do some press releases or get an article written about us in a publication.  The ideas are endless.   And after earnest debate, marketing is tasked with one or two of these programs and goes out and does a bang up job of executing.  Voila!  You have just witnessed the birth of random acts of marketing that rarely yield profitable results.  

If this is you and your organization, it’s time you take the time to research your audience, set your goals and objectives to your customers and to your business and align your marketing plans and tactics.   The purpose of this post is not to give you a marketing template but to perhaps recognize yourself and get motivated to become less random.   Recognizing you have a problem is the first step to solving it.

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