A lot of the time it is easy to get the impression that marketing is a very creative and even artsy endeavour. For many, “marketing” conjures up images of advertising agencies with creatives and copywriters and producers and graphic designers and all that stuff. What I have found, however, is that particularly in the beginning, marketing is all about pulling things together, tidying up and getting organized.
Right now, I am doing some tidying up in my own business, as well as building a branding agency with my BRAT Pack partners at Make Your Mark Global. I am also working on two other new projects that are just getting off the ground, and I find that collecting things and getting them organized is a huge part of the work involved.
Admittedly, I can become a bit of an organizing freak, but you know, that is not a bad thing. I actually think Monica Geller (who I am convinced is my sista from another mista) would make a great marketer with her impeccable organisational skills! :)
I know that when other people share with me what they are doing in their business and marketing, I always get a ton out of it. So I thought that I would share with you in this post what I am doing, and hopefully you can put some of this to good use for yourself.
So here are a 9 things to collect and get organised to make your marketing more effective:
- Collect all customer testimonials and put it in one document (I recommend a Google Doc).
- Collect images of all the customers who have given you testimonials and put them in one folder (again, I recommend putting it in a folder in your Google Drive, right there with the testimonials document).
- Collect all of your marketing materials for the past 1-2 years (further back if you think it is useful). You will need this to get an overview of what you have, what you need and whether your marketing materials are all consistent. We are talking pictures, videos, documents, advertising etc. etc.
- Put all marketing materials in organized folder in a cloud storage (I recommend Google Drive, but there are plenty of options out there, Dropbox being another popular one). You want to know exactly where things are so that you can easily get what you need when you need it and easily share things with people if required.
- Do a content audit of things that you already have and create a spreadsheet for good overview. List your blog posts, videos, ebooks, infographics, and anything else you may have created in the past. This way you know exactly what you have, may see gaps in your content creation, and can see where you can repurpose and recycle content.
- List any businesses, media and such that have the same target group as you and include their social media profiles in the list. This will come in very handy when targeting people online. For example, did you know that with Facebook ads you can target the followers of specific pages? (They have to have a fairly large following and there are glitches in the system, but all in all it works great). So if you know that your target audience loves a specific Facebook page, you can advertise specifically to the followers of that page.
- Create a list of your brand touchpoints. Each and every place that people can come in contact with your brand. That way you can go through them one by one and ensure that you are using them to their utmost potential to communicate your brand, and it makes it easier to ensure that your brand stays consistent wherever people see it.
- Collect sources of good content and put them into an online subscription service such as Feedly. That way you only need to go to one place to find great content created by others that you can share with your people via social media. Keep adding to it as you find more good stuff. ;)
- Create a list of media that is relevant to your brand. This can be useful for many things, such as targeting those media to get coverage in them, piggybacking on them to get in front of their audience (for example through Facebook ads as mentioned above) and to find great stuff to share with your audience.
If you are building a personal brand, here are a few other things you will want to keep track of:
- List everything you have done that is of note, and can be used to promote yourself, whether it be on your LinkedIn profile, your bio for various occasions, your speaker proposals and such. I bet that when you start pulling it all together, you realise that you have accomplished more than you thought. ;)
- Continue to keep a running list of everything you do that may be used for the above so that you don’t have to do another major tidy up at a later date. ;)
- Collect stories that are relevant to your brand – and that you can use in your public speaking. You don’t need to write them out in detail, just make a note of them and jot down the most relevant points so that when you are writing your copy or your talk, you can easily scan the document for juicy stories to use to lift things to another level.
Have you already done any of this or are you doing it? If not, which one are you going to start with? I’d love to hear about it!