You can’t ignore marketing – we all recognise its importance in the business mix. Properly done it helps you distinguish your business from your competitors, reinforce your importance to your clients and, ultimately, enable you to become a more successful organisation. It helps you know who you are, what you do and why your customers should choose you.
The problem is that everyone thinks they know how to do it. All too often we meet a company which has let the marketing responsibilities evolve internally. We have seen situations where the IT manager has been given the job of writing website copy, where the receptionist is expected to organise an important client event and even a (nameless) organisation which allowed the Finance Director to re-brand the company using his home bought copy of Photoshop. In all three situations we were called in to pick up the pieces. We could (and did) help but in all these ‘fire-fighting’ situations opportunities were lost and more money spent than needed to be.
Most of us wouldn’t dream of telling the Finance Director how to do his or her job, but when it comes to marketing everyone thinks they know best. In short, anyone thinks they can have a go. It’s great that everyone has an opinion about how the company they work for is marketed. But it’s important to distinguish this from the actual execution of the work. It’s near on vital to take those internal ideas and consolidate them into proper messages about your business which your marketing agency can use.
Without proper attention marketing can easily become iterative – when your business is quiet you market and when you’re busy marketing falls by the wayside. In this situation there is unlikely to be a marketing plan, although sometimes there is a marketing budget. And we’ve often heard comments from Directors about the need to spend on marketing to ‘tick the box’ but without a real idea of what that marketing needs to achieve.
So don’t leave it to your admin assistant who has a bit of space in their working week and fancies a go at marketing. Have a bit more respect for your business.
Recenseo is a team of marketing professionals – with a raft of marketing qualifications and first class commercial experience. Between us we have written and designed numerous websites and brochures, organised over 100 events, developed international advertising campaigns and secured PR coverage in national broadsheet publications. Put simply, we know what we are doing and how to market your business.
