Marketing Amnesia

Let’s say you and everyone in you company wakes up tomorrow with absolutely no memory of your marketing plan, budget, or vendors. Marketing is now a clean slate.
What do you do?
How many of you in your marketing departments were just rehashing and carrying on with the marketing plans and processes that were already in place. How many of you think that renegotiating your TV and Radio rates for the same spots every year is changing your marketing?
Let’s take an even fresher look.
Is TV, Radio, Newspaper, or the Internet right for you and your company? If you didn’t know you had used them before, when you took a look at your customer base would you use them now?
Let’s look at this with an open mind. Treat each medium like you would any prospective new vendor that you might use, put them through the paces. Do they meet with your target audience? Are they cost effective for that audience? Are they communicating your message in an easily understood way with your audience
As Marketers we have to understand we don’t set the conversation, our customers do. We also don’t make the communities that our audiences are in, we must find a way to get ourselves into those communities and speak with them how they speak. In almost every industry there are options for people to choose between one business and the other, and most people will choose the business that communicates with them on a human-to-human level, no a corporation-to-human level.
Your flashy TV ad doesn’t mean anything to me if it’s not communicated correctly, and it definitely doesn’t mean anything to me if you can’t back it up when I come to your location. If you have a great advertisement or even a Facebook page and it links back to your crappy under maintained store or website you have probably lost me as a customer, possibly for life.

Try this experiment at work. If you started from scratch which vendors would you keep? Which would you throw away? Which vendors would you possibly add? How do you communicate with your audience? Are you talking with them, at all, or just at them? Is it genuine? More importantly, WHO is your audience and are you communicating with them?