Marketing Is About Creating Your Future

You don’t go to the gym once and expect to have a six pack the next day, so why do you expect overnight results from your marketing?

In this vlog Grant explains the need to tread carefully in the digital age.

Have you ever turned over a resolution to get fitter, to lose some weight?

So you go to the gym, you exercise and then you come home and you say to your partner; ‘well, that didn’t work, I’m no fitter at all’.

You can’t go to the gym once and expect to be fit and have a six pack. You’ve got to go back, time after time, after time, and over days, weeks, months, and even years you’ll achieve the goals and the targets that you set.

Marketing’s exactly the same. You don’t build a reputation and credibility in a few days. That takes weeks, months, and even years of investment. In marketing terms, that means you need to differentiate between the short-term activities, where you do expect instant results – which we call sales activation – and the long-term activities, where you build reputation and credibility and awareness with your marketplace, which we call brand.

One of the outcomes of the digital world in which we now all live is everybody’s obsessed with all the sales activation’s shiny tools. So they do pay-per-click and Facebook advertising and LinkedIn advertising and all the things that they expect instant results from and they can really measure. But that comes at the expense of the long-term brand building activities, which aren’t instant, but are extremely important. While, of course, every business needs to build opportunities and get leads coming in, that’s a direct result of having the awareness and credibility of your marketplace.

For example, if someone sees an advert for your products or services, they’re more likely to respond if they’ve heard of you. What that means for businesses is really and truly you should be spending about 60% of your budget on brand building reputation building activities and 40% of your marketing budget on the sales activation, the stuff that’s going to generate leads for today.

Ultimately marketing’s about building your future and that means investing in your reputation and who you are and what you deliver. So you can have that long-term credibility with a marketplace.

Short term activities are important, but not at the expense of the long term and the future. It’s tragic for a business that’s been in business for 25 years, turning over millions, and they have to still work for every single sale, because no one knows who they are. So make sure that you don’t just invest in the short term. You also put money into the long term and you create a successful future for you and your business.

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order to facilitate the readability of the written English