All of these ingredients need to be available and present in order for marketing to be able to exist. All of these ingredients rely on a recipe to succeed, a recipe that needs to plan.
"What are you getting at?" I hear you ask.
Well, fundamentally I think that many businesses grapple with achieving the correct mix of all of these elements. They grapple with questions such as:
"Why do we need to spend money telling customers that?"
"Why are our staff not as passionate as we are?"
"Why are we on Social Media?"
"Where should we be marketing?"
"Should we be marketing?"
The above list is by no means an exhaustive one - I'm sure many of you would have plenty of questions to add. What happens in reality is that because businesses often don't take the time to deal with their marketing activities in a comprehensive manner, they are reactionary in their market endeavors.
Marketing takes time, which if correctly utilized, has the ability to achieve the desired results. Hasty decision making with regards to your marketing will lead to poor deployment of your resources (cash, human or otherwise). This poor deployment leads to a review of the resource allocation, which invariably leads to a rationalization of the resource.
Marketing for business sake is something you simply can't afford not to do. It's important that your resource is never deployed without a plan. It doesn't matter how good the deal is you're getting on your PR or advertising - if you haven't planned the communication, it will not work for you.
You could end up blaming the channel when in fact it was the planning that wasn't correctly executed. In short, when you market, do so with a plan.
Measure your results and refine your resource allocation - this is the only way to market for business sake.
PS. Social media is not free, despite what anyone tells you.
