Marketing Is a System, Not an Event

John Jantsch, www.ducttapemarketing.com

“Small business marketers love the chase,” declares John Jantsch, a marketing coach and author of Duct Tape Marketing. Jantsch explains,

They love a newfangled way to make the phone ring. But they often think of a marketing promotion as a single event. It’s precisely this view of marketing that holds most small businesses back. They fall prey to the “marketing idea of the week” and never fully explore what it takes to create and build a completely functioning, consistently performing, marketing system.

Small business owners have no problem thinking systems when it comes to say, accounting or hiring. When it comes to marketing though, all bets are off. It’s as if they are waiting for magic fairy dust to fall upon them with the next great marketing innovation.

Effective marketing is little more than creating and operating an effective marketing system. When I use the word system I mean several things: (1) the system is documented; you can’t have a system unless you write it down, (2) the system is built on sound marketing principles, and (3) you constantly measure, innovate, and refine the system.

Once you have spent the time and energy to create a plan, you need to commit your plan to a marketing calendar and then allocate the money it will take to implement your plan. When you create a calendar it is much more likely that you will look at the tasks like a “to-do” list. So, instead of worrying that you should do more marketing, you simply scratch each item off your list and plan for the next. It’s an amazingly simple but effective device.