Marketing is a Team Sport

Marketing is all about relationships, building relationships between you and your prospects and and customers, and it can’t be done by a single person. Marketing that works involves as many of your employees as possible. And I want to give you some ideas on how you can empower and activate more of your team in your marketing efforts.

The playbook
First, you need a plan and marketing is rife with activities without a purpose. It’s so easy to start a campaign or sign up for some ads or go to an event, or use some free platform. And those activities can distract and confuse your employees, as well as your prospects by being non-aligned. So it’s really important that everybody understands the playbook. What it is that you’re trying to accomplish with marketing, and which ways have you chosen to get that done. Ideally, you don’t have that many initiatives in marketing. You have just a few that you really invest in and do really well and get everybody on board, so it’s a coordinated, consistent, coherent effort. 

The roster
And beyond the plan, you want as many people in your business and in your network of vendors to be on board with the playbook, so that they can play their role. If you have a marketing person on your team and that marketing person is the only one doing anything about marketing and the only one that knows the tagline or the message or the positioning or the target, then you’re going to fail. Because marketing, as I said, it’s about the connections you have with so many people in the market. And the way to be successful is to have that story and that message and that behavior coming from everyone touching customers. Customer service people, account managers, sales team, product team. Everyone needs to be on the same page. If they are, then your marketing story and your opportunity gets multiplied through all those different players.

Practice
And then finally, like in any sport practice is what make takes you from average to excellent. You need to talk about your marketing strategy and your message and your target, all those things in your employee meetings and in your employee reviews, and you need to talk about them with existing customers as well as new prospects. It’s really important to socialize all of these playbooks and have everybody absorb them and then they will play their part without even having to think about it. And your marketing influence will grow.

So remember that it doesn’t cost you anything to take somebody that you’re already working with and instill in them the message that they are able to tell about who you are, what you do, and who you do it for. And I encourage you to create that playbook, sign up the roster, and have some good practice.