Business Exit Strategy

Somewhere along the line, direct marketing has become a whole lot less expensive and unfortunately, more thoughtless. Perhaps this happened when all of us "marketers" shifted much of our outbound messaging to email, blogs and eMarketing. It's easy, it's quick, it's affordable and most of all we can get some great metrics. Ah, every marketers dream.... instant access to data. We can see when our message was delivered, when you opened it, how many times you looked at it, if you clicked on any links, forwarded it to someone else, a conversion rate and on and on.

Don't get me wrong. As a marketer, I love it. But as a consumer, I'm not so sure I really like it. Particularly when I get thoughtless content hurled at me from a sender that didn't even take time consider what he or she was sending. I have a friend from college that includes me on a monthly newsletter about investing. We were buddies in college and all, but why would I really read it. Come on! He lives hundreds of miles away and maybe I'm old fashioned, but one thing I want from my financial advisor is the ability to meet face to face. Unless of course, I'm wanting to invest my money with an NYC super investment hero who is getting unbelievable returns for investors....l'm thinking "Made Off". (Which by the way is a great name for a con artist.)

Google is trying to become an energy trader. That tells you how much time we’re all spending on the Internet. Their servers use enough power each day to provide for a small city. If our new connected lifestyle means more channels for messaging, then please make the messages relevant just like my search engine does. This is an important part of any marketing strategy or business plan. I received an email today from a very nice person. He took all but two minutes to repurpose a corporate email and sent it to me (and likely thousands of others) by just sending it on. No commentary or anything. Just forwarded the email and a very short note that he would be happy to help me with any of my "bland" needs (name withheld to protect the nice guy.) I looked at it and thought, how in the world does this create any new business for this person? Maybe it works, but I highly doubt it.

Yesterday I met with Jesubi. They are doing some cool stuff for small businesses. They help you manage the top end of the sales funnel. I see many companies both large and small that struggle with making marketing and sales work well together. There are many tools out there to help you manage content, automate marketing, and provide measurement - but the technology doesn't help you on the most important part, "the message". It seems to be getting lost in the fascination with the technology and the marketer's busy daily schedule between meetings.

With all these new tools and capabilities I believe as marketers our challenge is to remember one core concept that will benefit both ourselves and our clients...content is still king. This should be remembered when building anything, a go to market strategy, a global marketing strategy or simple business plan. Helping our clients remember this and deliver relevant, quality information providing value to customers is what is going to bring in business. It doesn’t matter how fast or cost efficiently you deliver a message if it isn’t worth reading.