Random acts of Marketing

Had a great meeting with a clever guy (a new client in fact) this week who unprompted confessed to implementing ‘Random acts of Marketing’. A great comment and one which got me thinking…

How many companies within the construction industry are actually brave enough to step forward and ask for marketing help? How many actually have a coherent strategy in place for their marketing at all? And in fact, how many other intelligent marketing professionals are out there, massively time poor, suffering in silence with ‘Random acts of Marketing’ that are doing little to aid their bottom line, brand awareness, customer retention or any other business goal for that matter?

Firstly, what exactly is random marketing? It simply means spending large amounts of marketing money randomly, without any strategy or goal. The fact is that by doing this you are wasting money! When marketing, you should consider your target audience, analyse your competitors, promote your company products and services, build up your brand image and doing this properly should increase your profits and reputation. However this should not be done without a clearly defined purpose and strategy in place to guide your marketing activities and ensure that that everything you do will contribute to your overall goal - running a successful business! Generally a marketing plan should include some strategic categories:

• Internal Marketing
• Branding (brand building)
• Publicity
• Advertising (using online marketing and/or traditional media)
• Creating a marketing budget and allocating parts of it to appropriate activities

So…what are these “Random acts of Marketing” that I am referring to? Well, here is a quick list off the top of my head:

• Google ad words accounts that haven’t been checked in more than a week (aka. The idiot tax)
• Google ad words accounts that are not directed to specific landing pages
• Blogs without any links to the company website
• Blogs that get irregular and sporadic attention by way of updates
• Sending out a single email campaign and hoping this would be sufficient
• A single email campaign that is not followed up
• An email campaign that is not integrated with a landing page, advert or press release etc.Setting up web tracking software with no goals for your website
• Any social media profile that has no objectives (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook)
• A social media page only checked or updated sporadically
• A website or blog containing no informative/interesting content
• A full page advert in a magazine that has no links to any other channel marketing
• An advert that has a weak call to action
• An unprofessionally designed online campaign
• Web pages with no call to action and yet your sales staff are demanding leads, contacts or business opportunities
• Creating campaigns with no goals
• Implementing campaigns without determining how it’s going to be measured
• Spending 80% of budgets on print advertising and not want anything in return (it’s happened!)
• Using an advertising medium that is not appropriate/effective for your target market.

How many MD’s, FD’s, CD’s, business development managers, marketing managers, sales directors in the construction industry are afraid of new techniques and would rather bury their heads than actually ‘man up’ and step forward to ask for help? How many will admit they are frustrated because there is not enough available time to be devoted to getting a grip on their marketing activities?  Others know that what they are doing is either out of control or even worse, stuttering to start and therefore probably not aiding the bottom line one bit.

These are hard working guys and gals that know what they should be doing, yet they fail to pull together a cohesive plan to help themselves and make their own lives easier. It’s so often the case that you sometimes really can’t see the wood for the trees. Therefore I say, don’t be afraid to reach out and ask for help, you might be able to save yourselves a lot of time and money by creating a focused plan and strategy for your marketing activities. Doing things randomly never benefits anyone and you won’t know what you have been missing until you give it a try!

Are you brave enough to own up to any random acts of marketing?