By Upendra Mishra
WALTHAM, MA–How can you jumpstart your marketing and business development campaign in a downturn and in hypercompetitive market conditions? How can you inspire your prospective customers to allocate necessary capital for your projects?
With your marketing channels and campaign scattered all over, where to start? Direct mail, email, digital marketing, social media, X, LinkedIn, traditional media, search engine optimization, blogs, microblogs, videos, YouTube, sponsorships, networking events, or simply advertising? But, where and how? How can you scale up result-driven marketing efforts?
We have tried all the above for our clients. This is what we have found:
Emails: When email marketing came to the forefront, it was effective, and the response was fast. It is still a useful tool, but spam filters have become a major hurdle. Open rates are down. Unsubscribe options are often used by the recipients. Keeping an email database updated and growing it every year by at least 20 percent (in order to be effective) is challenging.
Social media: Social media channels are great for visibility and digital presence, but we hardly see lead generation and deals being closed from social media platforms. Social media is a feel-good marketing strategy that you’re doing something. The ROI is negligible—unless you are in retail business.
Traditional media: The digital media landscape has eroded the influence of traditional media. In the pre-digital age, most of the marketing was done through various news outlets: either we got an article published or covered, or we used clever advertising. Now, we don’t know where our potential customers are getting their news from.
Sponsorships: Event sponsorships do increase some visibility-at least during in-person occasions, but most companies fail to follow up. Sponsorship is a waste of money if it is not followed through during the next 12 months after the event is over.
Website: Websites are a must today, there is no question. Most companies, however, design a great website and then forget about it. It is still better than not having a website at all, but a dormant website might defeat the whole purpose of marketing, giving the impression that nothing is happening at the company—if constant updates are not made.
Is the website fully optimized? Is it listed in all search engines? Do you monitor visitors to your site? Does it have the right metatags? Is it search engine friendly? Is it easy to read its content on smart phones? Is it updated regularly? Is it integrated with all your marketing channels?
Content marketing: This is a powerful tool in anyone’s toolset. But it takes a lot of resources to create relevant and attractive content: blogs, thought and leadership articles, video documentaries, and smart posts. Is your content newsy, interesting, and insightful that appeals to your target audience?
Integration: To get maximum impact, are all your marketing efforts fully integrated? Is there a process to manage marketing technology, create content, distribute, update database and be consistent?
In the future columns, we will deal with each one of these challenges. Stay tuned.
(Mr. Mishra is president of the Waltham, MA-based The Mishra Group, an integrated full-service marketing, business development and public relations firm. Since 1997, the Mishra Group has provided comprehensive, results-oriented solutions for the fast-paced new age of online and traditional marketing. He can be reached at [email protected])
