The Science of Marketing

I just read a post from Drew McLellan that is both simple and true.  In "Are Your Eyes Bigger than Your Budget," Drew reminds us that we have to draw a line when spending money on marketing.  The moral to his story, I believe, is not that we should cut back our spending to the point where we’re no longer marketing, but that we should let our budgets be our guides to prudent, effective programs.

There are plenty of ways to burn through a marketing budget without getting much return.  Sometimes I feel like a broken record when I say this, but the most important thing we can do is focus.  We should focus on the audiences that are critical for success.  We should focus on the conduits to those audiences that offer the most credibility and the broadest reach.  We should focus our messages on the one or two things that meet the audience’s urgent needs, while differentiating us from our competitors.  And most importantly, we should focus on our marketing goals as an acid test for green lighting any program.

Budgeting is a pain.  Always has been, always will be.  But an even greater pain than the act of budgeting is the realization that we’ve wasted precious dollars on programs that didn’t provide a return.  In order to avoid this kind of pain, focus on your audience, conduits, messages and goals before you start plugging numbers into a spreadsheet. 

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