The Recipe for a Successful Marketing Strategy

Marketing is a little bit like baking: you have an end goal (that usually comes with high expectations), a list of tools you will need, ingredients, and steps to follow to achieve your end result.

In both cases, you have to think about your budget. With marketing, this is financial. When it comes to baking, your budget is caloric. In both cases you know that the more you spend you are more likely to achieve a better result.

In baking, when using heaps of butter, sugar, flour and other high-caloric ingredients, we know that if we follow the steps correctly, our recipe will produce a rich, mouth-watering dessert. However there is a huge caloric cost, and if we’re on a diet treating ourselves to cupcakes, cookies or brownies seems to become a distant fantasy. Does this mean that we have to give up treats and baking all together? Not necessarily, but it does mean we have to be a little bit clever about it and stick to a budget we can afford.

Marketing is exactly the same. In times where finances are plentiful, we can afford to splurge on high-cost ‘ingredients’ such as TV or paper advertising, launch parties, big PR stunts, freebies, etc.. What happens when there is little or no budget? Do we stop marketing? Saying no to spending does not mean we cannot keep ‘baking’ – all we need is to come up with the right recipe.

The key to a good recipe is to find the right ingredients: not only they need to make you spend the least amount of your budget, but they also need to be tasty, and most importantly healthy. Take an ingredient like synthetic sweetners for example: yes it’s low calories, but at what cost? It’s considered one of the most toxic substances we use on a daily basis (its chemical composition is found to be very similar to rat poison!). Similarly in the marketing world we can be enticed to use ‘black hat’ online strategies or sign a bad contract with ‘daily deal’ companies which give us the promise of high-volume publicity but that leave us in the lurch if we’re not careful.

Finding the ‘holy grail’ recipe means that there will be a lot of time spent in the kitchen trying useless combination after useless combination. If you persevere however, you will start seeing results; and by combining all your small successful attempts you will ultimately come up with a winning recipe where the outcome is a triumph and the budget spend was low. I’ve spent years trying to find the secret for healthy brownies. I’ve also spent years trying to refine marketing strategies on a shoestring budget – they are both equally as challenging as they are rewarding.

As much as I can share the recipe for the brownies, sharing a marketing equivalent would be impossible because each business is different and there is no such thing as a ‘one size fits all’ approach.

It’s not always easy, and it does take hard work. The result however, is even more satisfying than using a high-budget list of ingredients: nothing beats the feeling of achieving something that may have seemed impossible – and you can. A perfect combination of ingredients may be hard to find (especially if we’re new at ‘baking’) and sometimes it’s worth spending a small amount of money by asking a chef who’s gone through the process to avoid expensive mistakes.

If you need any help baking your digital marketing strategy please get in touch http://www.socialmediamentors.co.uk/

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