Back to Marketing Basics

Do you find that you get so caught up in the new stuff sometimes that you forget the basics? I've spent a lot of time in the past year focusing on "internet marketing" and get very animated about it when given the opportunity (so much so that people are getting wary of letting me get onto the subject these days). I still think it's amazing and love that fact that I can measure practically everything online in a way that you just can't with traditional marketing. I reckon I'll soon be able to find out what my customers had for breakfast as well as how many times they visited our website, although I'm not sure that's terribly useful.

I'll get back to the point - see it happens every time... In spite of all of the above, we recently got the chance to sponsor a local business event in the East Midlands. This was excellent - a fab networking opportunity too and you know how much we go on about that. As the event got closer I thought I ought to get organised and prepared a short set of slides with some big screen-shots of MarketingPlanWiz - well it is an online service so that made sense. Then I had to think about what I could leave on people's tables (it was a sit-down dinner).

I know this should be obvious to somebody who's supposed to know about marketing but I had to think. I'd been so used to promoting us with pay per click advertising, SEO, linking and the like that we didn't have any "stuff" to leave on a table! So back to what I (used to) know best and on with producing a leaflet - a memorable one of course that stood out from all of the other leaflets. Do you know it was really nice to go back to good old design and print? It's still good to have something you can get hold of, wave about and feel (is it only me that does that with literature?) and read it without peering at a computer screen. And heaven knows we spend enough time staring at people's websites and googling.

I'm happy now!

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk