Key Marketing Tips For 2010

Now that it’s a new year and decade, it’s time to wean the marketing group away from their delusions of strategic grandeur. Here’s a simple, six-step program to ensure that your company’s marketing is successful and productive in 2010:

STEP #1: Know What Marketing Means To Your Business. If your company’s marketers think that they’re doing something “strategic”, they’re wasting money. Marketing is a relational function now whose sole purpose is to build and enhance relationships with potential and current clients. In a thriving marketing group, all activities serve the goal of building business and profit share.

STEP #2: Create A Strong Marketing Strategy. In most companies, there isn't a strong strategic marketing campaign that can be implemented with a systematic approach. This is very much needed in order to generate revenue within your company. Marketing has to be faced head on in order to survice in this economy, because there are so many businesses that have folded, your clients have to know that you are still in business.

STEP #3: Know Who Is Your Target Client. A sales lead should identify a decision-maker inside a company that’s part of your target market and provide enough information about the decision-maker, and the decision-maker’s philosophy and techniques on how they run their business. Know your client inside and out!

STEP #4. Create Systems. Systems creation should never be an ad-hoc improvisation based on whatever product you want to sell today. Systems creation must be part of an integrated process that constantly creates leads and has a measurable effect on sales effectiveness.

STEP #5: Responsible Sales Force. Once the sales team has agreed that a lead is qualified, they MUST be made 100 percent accountable for closing that lead through strategies that your specific target audience will be engaged. Know how your client would like to receive your marketing messages and how you can consistently create loyalty though them.

STEP #6: Marketing ROI. Monitor your strategic activities, find out which ones result in leads that close, and then tune the demand creation process in order to constantly improve the quality of the leads. Make sales and marketing jointly accountable for closing deals.