Random Acts of Marketing
In last month’s newsletter, I urged you to “Plan to Plan Your Marketing Plan”, and provided seven important items to consider when doing so. Well, it is time to actually do it – It is time to make a decision about what you want to accomplish in marketing next year, and how you plan to go about it. In other words, it is time to put down, in writing, how marketing strategy and efforts will be leveraged to accomplish your organization’s goals in 2018.
I recently met a successful attorney who runs a very large and thriving law firm, with offices in several states – Let’s call him JT. We discussed their past and current marketing efforts as reference points for future planning. After discussing proper marketing planning, budgeting, and tactics, JT told me that to-date, the firm has only “committed random acts of marketing”. I liked the phrase a lot, and I thought it was right on. I told him that with his permission, I would be using it from now on!
As a marketing firm that offers marketing leadership and marketing services, we see companies committing random acts of marketing all the time. By ‘random’, in this context, I mean marketing activities such as purchasing booth space in a trade show, but not announcing participation to customers and prospects ahead of time; without setting measurable goals; and without a defined way to follow up with leads. Another example would be offering a 20% discount to everyone, even to customers who don’t need or want it, and neglecting to promote it properly.
No matter what the random act of marketing is, most of them exhibit the following characteristics:
- Not part of an overall organizational or marketing strategy
- Each one of the acts is not individually well planned (budget, timeline, delegated responsibilities, etc.)
- Absence of defined measurable goals
- Often not effective
Two additional important things to remember regarding your marketing plan:
- Costs: When marketing activities are not planned well, costs tend to be higher than they should be otherwise, due to last minute purchases of collateral, promotional items, late reservations, etc.
- Bad Experience: Even with best intentions and the most creative marketing ideas, if executed poorly, efforts will yield poor results. These discouraging experiences tend to cause management to be less likely to approve future marketing efforts.
- Reputation: Your customers and prospects are watching. Low attendance, failed promotions, and other lackluster performances reflect badly on your organization, and will discourage customers and prospects from paying attention or participating in future activities.
Business owners and managers were delighted at this new concept of ‘Fractional CMO’ and so were we. Over the years, our clients asked us for more than just planning and management of their marketing – they wanted us to help them execute and implement what we have planned for them to do. We gladly obliged.
Make every ounce of effort, every penny of your budget, and every minute of yours and your staff’s time count! Plan your marketing efforts for next year, and do not just commit random acts of marketing!
Duke Merhavy, MBA, Ph.D.
President & Chief Marketing Officer
THANK YOU!
This is the time of year to give thanks and express gratitude, and we want to thank our clients, friends, and other readers of our newsletter, for another great year!
We love what we do, and we enjoy seeing the impact we make on those we work with. We wouldn’t be here if you were not giving us the opportunity to serve you!
Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!
The Staff of Fractional CMO & Marketing
What Is Fractional CMO & Marketing?
Fractional CMO & Marketing is ‘Your Smart Marketing Formula’ when you need expert marketing leadership and marketing services to accelerate growth and improve profitability, but you’re not quite ready to hire a full-time Chief Marketing Officer or your own marketing department
Our unique arrangement is the most efficient, innovative, and cost-effective formula for you. Click on the image on the right to watch a short video.
Marketing Lingo: Open Rate and Click-Through Rate of Emails
One of the first and greatest challenges in every marketing email is to get the recipients to open the email they receive. It is a considerable challenge because we are all inundated with countless emails, and standing out is not an easy task!
Open rate refers to the percentage of the email recipients who actually opened the email. Please note that this rate is almost never 100% accurate due to a multitude of technical reasons that prevent senders from recognizing some ‘opens’ and sometimes counting ‘opens’ of some recipients multiple times, even if they actually only opened once.
Example: 1000 emails were sent, and 200 recipients opened it – Open rate = 20%
Click-through rate refers to the percentage of recipients who clicked on any hyperlink embedded within the email. The most common method calculates the click-through rate relatively to those who opened the email.
Example: Out of the 200 recipients who opened the email, 100 clicked on the hyperlink to a landing page – Click-through rate = 50%
Everyone wants to know what’s considered good, or at least acceptable open and click-through rates. The answer is not simple… there are a multitude of variables to consider including industry, content, list used, timing, and many more. Contact us, and we will be happy to help you figure out what your open and click-through rates might mean.
‘Marketing Lingo’ is a regular column in which we define, or otherwise explain, terms often used in marketing but not necessarily correctly or properly by some
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