The number one secret to successful and profitable marketing is to get your marketing systems in order. Marketing systems and processes, marketingsystems and processes is phrase you will want to quickly learn to remember. When your marketing systems are in order, you become unstoppable, your marketing emergencies cease and instead of being all over the place, you get to focus on “working the system.” You might be thinking, this sounds really basic. I know I need to get the right marketing systems in place. Knowing and doing are two totally different things. We are here to help you actually do things. At No Joke Marketing we like to call those things profitable actions. Before you discount the word system in general, please understand, when we use the word system we are referring to a whole variety of different systems:
- Amarketing systemfor planning and putting together your strategy (marketing plan and calendar)
- Amarketing systemfor tracking your leads (typically called a customer relationship management system)
- A marketing systemfor tracking your results. (tracking numbers, URL’s, codes)
- And finally, amarketing deployment system(the tools that will be leveraged)
In working in hundreds of different industries and having owned 11 business ourselves, we finally learned that when the marketing systems were in order everything else flowed and became easier. We’ve always believed that any business can be successful with solid marketing. If your having to spend your days putting our fires, at the very least make sure your marketing systems are humming. They will keep the leads coming in and your current customers happy. Without leads and customers, you have no business. That is the reason these systems are so important, marketing must be the number one function in your business. Anytime a new venture is started we are always itching to get marketing. However, we always spend the first month nailing down the marketing systems before doing so. To put things into a more “real life” scenario, let’s use this company, No Joke Marketing. The brand itself is on the newer side. However, we’ve been teaching marketing for over 10 years. We also use to run the Guerrilla Marketing company, so marketing education and training is an area we’re not new to. This company was born out of the need for good, simple, profitable marketing training and education that was 100% up to date (if not ahead of the curve. Rather than just dive in and hope the activities we would complete would create success, the first two months were focused on start up tactics and marketing systems to ensure profitability. Here are a few of the tactics that we completed in starting No Joke Marketing:
Start Up Tactics:- Company name chosen
- Trademarks filed
- LLC formed
Marketing System Tactics:- Brand brief created to showcase how the brand should be leveraged from a visual standpoint
- 6 sentence marketing plan completed, along with our 12 month calendar.
- Core values chosen. This will help us in the hiring process for both clients and prospects. We hold our culture and values to the highest of importance
- Customer Relationship Management system chosen and setup (Infusionsoft.com)
- Tracking tools in place (Google analytics, Grasshopper.com with phone extensions and a wordpress plugin to make easy tracking landing pages)
- Web marketing deployment tools ready (hootsuite for social media, raven tools for seo, lucky orange for monitoring and aweber.com for email marketing)
Marketing systems will keep you in business for the long haul. They should become thethe backbone to the company. The big thing to keep in mind is why do any marketing without having these systems in place? How can you grow and scale a business without a plan and without some mechanisms to track success. This is what leads to marketing frustration. Let’s say you decide to dabble in social media and throw $1000 in ad spend to Facebook. After a few weeks you see a slightup tickin traffic to your web site but are unsure if things worked, discouraged you pull down the ads and try something else. Your marketing systems will guide your campaigns and your decision making. If you’re in start up mode, spend the first month getting your systems in order. If you’re in grow mode, audit your current systems and your current tactics to locate some low hanging fruit and spot potential issues that need to be addressed. Get your systems in place and your business will thrive. At No Joke Marketing, we don’t like to talk theory, we like to talk action. More importantly, profitable actions. Here are the top four profitable action steps you can begin working on
immediately.
Action Steps:- Go thru and audit your marketing.Take a look at every tactic you are currently using and perform a simple SWOT analysis.
- Put together your six sentence plan and your 12 month calendar.Welike simple but effective plans.These will guide you for years to come.
- Get or update your current customer relationshipmanagementsystem. The two that we tend torecommendthe most are Salesforce.com and Infusionsoft.com but the best solution will vary based on your needs and the type of your business.
- Take a look at how you are currently tracking results and put some additional tracking in place. The two easiest systems to setup are a phone number with various extensions and unique landing page URL’s. This allows you to then assign a phone number or URL to a specific campaign you are deploying.
Take some action and know we arehere for you and we’ve got your back!
