How many ways can you market your business?

Whenever I speak to people about marketing their businesses there is one question that I always ask them: “How many ways are there to market your business?” OR, if said another way, “How many marketing tactics are there?” Then, the next question is: “How many have you tried?”

Inevitably, the number that is mentioned is approximately 5 – 10 different tactics. And the number that most people have tried is around 4 – 6. If that is your experience then you are part of the norm. If your experience is different with larger numbers, then you are part of a very unique, and very small, minority.

I recently spent some time documenting the number of marketing tactics I could identify. Some are traditional tactics, some are interactive and social tactics, while others are guerrilla type tactics and the last group is “just common sense tactics”. Believe it or not, so far I have reached a count of over 150 different tactics – mind boggling, isn’t it?  Just think of this as a marketing toolbox, full of tools that you can select and use whenever appropriate.

Marketing toolbox

So, you may ask, if that is true, how on earth does the average business person decide what tactics to use; and more importantly, how many should be used in a single year of marketing effort?

How do you decide what marketing tactics to use?

If you can only think of a handful of tactics (and they are probably the most common ones that are used by most people) then you are probably competing with your competitors in almost all spheres of marketing. By doing that, you may find it difficult to stand out from the crowd.  And, of course, you are definitely missing out on a number of opportunities that may make it easy for you to enhance performance.

The solution is to identify tactics that are not necessarily commonly used and to bolster your marketing campaign with a range of these tactics. But the challenge still remains – what are my marketing tactic options?

The best way to develop this list is to step back from looking for the answers and to simply ask more questions. The answers to those questions will often give rise to new and exciting tactics that have never been considered by you before. It is finding the right questions to ask that then becomes the key to your success.  Once you ask the right questions you will find that developing a proper marketing strategy and marketing plan is easy.

How many should be used in a single year of marketing effort?

The answer to that question revolves around what is appropriate for the business and what is affordable. It also gets addressed as part of the questioning and via setting proper goals and objectives for the organization.

This process of questioning can be considered as Strategic Marketing – it is the key to the long-term health and success of your business, and it is not very complicated if you know how to go about it.

Unfortunately, if you don’t have a marketer with a strategic vision on your payroll, you may require some help. The process requires some hand-holding, but the benefits will be far reaching.

Think about this – if you feel that you have not maximized the marketing opportunities available to your company, then you should start asking more questions. Relevant questions. Questions, that will cause the opportunities to reveal themselves in some mystical and magical way. Actually, it’s not really mystical or magical – much of it is, in fact, just common sense or SMART marketing.

If you are interested to find out how to ask the right marketing questions, and develop your own marketing toolbox, call me at (905)886-2235 or email me neville@mastermindsolutions.ca

Neville Pokroy consults in the areas of strategic marketing planning, as well as in the development and execution of marketing strategies and plans. He assists companies who require marketing expertise to plan and fully execute marketing programs.  If you want to have more choice in marketing your business and in setting yourself apart, and increase the odds of improving company performance, visit our website.