Without a diverse marketing plan, your vast flow of new customers can quickly become a slow drip. If you rely heavily on any one marketing tactic, when it slows or stops, your entire business will slow or stop.

While the crux of your marketing message should almost always be the same, using different vehicles to deliver that message is a must. With so many different ways to deliver your marketing message, taking the time to research and develop a multi-pronged approach can pay huge dividends.

Google rankings for example, (organic or paid) are often the main and in some cases, the only way many of the businesses we talk to find new customers. Kinder Start, a parenting resources company I read about recently is no exception. They relied on Google as one of it’s only marketing funnels for new customers. And I might add it worked great. That is until Google dropped KinderStart.coms page ranking to zero. This lead to a 70% drop in traffic to their site, which now gets only .01% of it’s referrals from Google.

Because Kinder Start had no other marketing irons in the fire, they decided to sue Google (an 80 billion dollar company) in an attempt to regain their former positioning. Needless to say, this case was promptly thrown out of court and, in my opinion, for good reason: Any company that relies so heavily on one channel to attract clients is placing it’s livelihood in the hands of that lone channel.

I fully understand that for most businesses, it can be difficult to stick with a well-rounded marketing plan when they often get faster, more impressive results just focusing on only one or two marketing tactics (like Googles Adwords). However, in the long run, ongoing, conventional marketing tactics (like direct mail) can have an even bigger pay-off in addition to helping you reach new audiences.

The key is to look at everything in your marketing plan over a given period of time. Since some tactics (like direct mail) often require more time than others, measure everything for about a year before completely cutting one marketing channel in favor of another. Too often companies will write off a marketing tactic too soon because of no or poor results.

This is a huge mistake. Your marketing investment may require time and patience before they yield a profitable return. Pull out too soon and you risk losing everything you have invested in that channel so far.

This is not to say that if you’ve tried a variety of marketing tactics and received little or no return in the investment over a given period of time that you should keep funding those channels. Sticking with what works is the obvious thing to do. That said, successful marketing campaigns are often successful as a result of the message being sent, and not the vehicle that delivers it. The more vehicles delivering that message, the less likely you are to get stuck on the side of the road.

If the marketing you are engaged in now is working, your competition will eventually catch on and it’s effectiveness may begin to thin. If market conditions change, (like they did on 9/11) then you may need to find alternative ways to reach new customers. The companies that already have multiple ongoing marketing strategies will be in the best position to deal with any sudden changes in their market.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.