Marketing 101

Dealing with lots of ideas

There are plenty of ideas out there. Some are good and some are not as good. The real skill is to be able to pick the good ideas. If you can then find a way to measure the ideas that you have picked, you are in the ideal position.

Here is a list of steps to get where you need to be. It’s an obvious list but sometimes the things standing in front of you are the most difficult to distill.

Here goes….

Step 1. Line up all your ideas.
Step 2. Put them in order, starting with the best idea and moving to the worst idea.
Step 3. Assign costs to each idea
Step 4. Reorder them in a new list starting with the idea which you expect to be the most effective relative to it’s cost and ending with the idea which you expect to be least effective relative to it’s cost.
Step 5.Establish a way to measure the effectiveness of each activity relative to the others.
Step 6.Structure a plan to implement all the ideas you believe are worth investing in and can afford.
Step 7: Implement ideas
Step 8. Establish test period and gather feedback.
Step 9. Analyse feedback and choose which ideas are performing best in terms of ROI.

Plan
The structure above is not easy but marketing plans are important, if you were building a house, you would never start by putting a few bricks down, you would get a solid plan together first and it’s the same for marketing, the better you plan, the greater your chance of success.

Assess the ROI
Unless market share is your primary goal, it’s difficult to think of an instance where you would spend marketing dollars which would give you a return which is smaller in the long term than it costs. Always ask yourself how much “product” you would need to move in order to make this activity profitable. If it’s a direct mailer and you need a 7% return then probably don’t waste your time.