A former high school coach of mine used to say, “when you think you stink”, meaning, sometimes when you wait and overthink a pass, a play, the opponent catches on and it’s too late, ergo, when you think, you stink. Well that may be true for sports but for marketing your business, not so much. That’s not to say, you need to paralyze yourself with analytics, but you do need to strategize.
We are asked all the time how to spend marketing dollars for all size and type companies. Whether we are working with a small business just opening their doors, a new pharma venture, an international franchise company or a cancer research non-profit, the answer always starts with the right strategic conversation.
To those that personally plan out their day, their month, their year, strategic direction for a business makes obvious sense. For those that compete in sports, you don’t play a game of anything, chess or soccer, tennis or sailing, without a strategy to navigate effectively with the goal to beat your own last effort or your competitor. So, why not do the same for your company’s brand building efforts?
If we’ve convinced you that strategy is the right place to start, then why are so many businesses doing and not planning? From our experience it’s rarely about money and mainly about time. Many businesses don’t want to wait to develop the right positioning, customer profile, competitive analysis and so they just do, and do a lot of random things that aren’t measurable and they keep doing those things over and over again.
And yes sometimes these random things work if someone is driven enough to find out where their leads are coming from, or from plain luck, but most of the time they execute without a plan and come calling us when they reach a plateau. They call and ask things like, “I think I need a new social media graphic or maybe a new logo, can you quickly mock up a print ad for me?” The answer is always, “No, no and no.”
Stop doing and start thinking and the right time to build a strategy is always NOW.
We have a path we follow to help brands get and stay on track, check it out.
