Achieving Sustainability

 

Having announced the 25th Year Anniversary for Creative Technical Resources, Inc., I feel qualified to lightly touch on the subject of sustainability with twenty suggestions. 

• Deliver the highest level of quality consistently
• Work with purpose
• Provide customer service with all you've got
• Ensure that you are always on the forefront of technology
• Educate yourself and your employees as part of your mode of operation
• Be trustworthy at all times
• Work with good intent
• Diversify your products and services often
• Listen to what your customer wants
• Never assume you know it all
• Communicate
• Price fairly
• Treat suppliers, customers and employees with dignity, honesty and respect
• Go to work every day with passion to do your best in everything you do for all stakeholders
• Give your clients reason to want to work with you
• Make a distinction between when to manage conservatively and when to take calculated risks
• Take the time to understand the consequences of all of your actions
• Be happy 
• Enjoy what you do
• Look toward the future with enthusiasm and drive

Reap the Benefits of Press Releases

Many of our customers have reaped the benefits of press releases. If you're considering expanding your horizon, then you should definitely include press releases in your marketing mix. You can share newsworthy information through the media either alone or in combination with other methods of communication. Press releases enable you to increase awareness, gain exposure, establish a presence, promote new services/products, make a statement or take a stance. Through a press release, new technologies/innovations can be announced, and multicultural or selected audiences can be communicated with directly. Whether you want to generate publicity for an event, develop an individual as an expert source or integrate images such as photos or videos, press releases are an effective marketing tool.

Multimedia Production

Multimedia production can be an effective tool in your communication planning. Scripted and produced multimedia can be used for marketing, advertising, and sales. It can include writing, animation, graphics, and music. Multimedia productions can be used as conference materials, for customer testimonials, training/education programs, public service announcements, radio and television spots, and special event coverage. You can post your productions on your website, send them out as emails, and include them as a trade show giveaway on a flash drive. Productions can be viewed on YouTube, linked on your Facebook page, and included in your LinkedIn Profile. Do consider where you might have an opportunity to incorporate multimedia productions into your marketing mix. It's a tool that is well worth the planning and can be viewed for years to come.

Corporate Newsletters

Lift the weight off of your shoulders by finding a company that will help you manage your newsletter every step of the publication process. Whether you have identified your need as being online or printed, there are companies that can help you coordinate and collect articles and photographs from contributors, write new articles and edit submitted articles, schedule photography, when needed, design, print and distribute, and help you manage your list. When newsletters are planned ahead and managed professionally, they are successful, leaving your internal staff to identify opportunities for article content or new and refreshing article contributors instead of trying to manage a detailed process on top of their day-to-day responsibilities. Whether your audience is your customer or your employee, you can use a newsletter to inform, educate and motivate. And whoever you're targeting, make sure you have appealing stories with eye-catching visuals and consistency in format.

Don't Assume You Know What Your Audience is Thinking or What They Need

Developing printed and/or online surveys should be an element in your marketing plan development. Surveys are a great way to capture trends, collect data, or assess client, supplier or employee satisfaction. You really should never assume that you know what your audience is thinking or what they want. With many of the online tools available, it is quite simple and cost-effective to put together an online survey. Print surveys might cost you a little more and take a little more time, however, depending upon your audience, you might prefer this route. You might not always like the information you get back, but it's necessary to make adjustments to your marketing message, tools and activities often to enable you to move forward.

How can you get started?

1. Identify required information for collection
2. Define your audience
3. Develop questions
4. Design and administer your survey
5. Collect and analyze data
6. Prepare a final report of your results
7. Identify what you can do to make necessary changes
8. Share your results and your plan of action
9. Develop a timeline and get buy-in
10. Move forward and make a positive difference
    

Evaluate Your Marketing Plan

Introduction
I cannot stress enough the importance of taking the time to evaluate your marketing plan. You not only make sure that everyone is on board to support your overall goals and objectives, but you also make sure that your spending is getting the results you want. By the way, you also spend less when you plan ahead!

What Does Your Marketing Plan Look Like?
Do you know if you have a marketing plan, who developed it and when? You should know how often it is evaluated, who oversees the plan and who administers the plan. Are you aware of what products/services your marketing plan covers? What audience does it serve? What does your marketing plan cost? Do you know whether or not it's effective? What type of return are you getting?

How Can You Affect Your Marketing Plan?
I started my message to you with quite a few questions. I notice that usually when the topic of a marketing plan comes up with our clients, they don't know who has responsibility for taking the time to develop one and getting concurrence on the activities and budget. You can affect your marketing plan by:

1. Developing it or revitalizing it
2. Communicating the plan to all involved parties
   
3. Implementing it
4. Monitoring it
   
5. Recommending change when change is needed
   
6. Making sure that changes are instituted and communicated
   
7. Documenting how it is more effective to have a plan than to not have a plan
8. Encouraging others to adopt it and work within it
9. Championing its vitality
10. Measuring the return

Understand Your Patterns
It helps if you understand whether your company's marketing activities are spur of the moment decisions or well-thought out plans of action. You need to get a grip on what you're doing as a company in relationship to your entire marketing campaign. Ask yourself: Would my actions have been different if I had planned them a few weeks or months ago?

Gain Control of Your Activities
You need to know what you are doing right now and what your plan looks like by individual product and service. You should be able to look at your plan by:

• Month/quarter
• Activities
• Costs
• Results
• Effectiveness

Evaluate Your Plan
Make a table with the following categories across the top:

• Product/Service
• Activities
• Costs
• Measurement
• Results

Grade each activity with a 1 or a 2 or a 3.

• 1 Great — Keep going
• 2 Good — Keep an eye on it
• 3 Fair — Change something or cancel

Summary
This brief look at evaluating your marketing plan should help you make strides in developing and revitalizing your marketing plan as well as ensuring that the results from your activities are effective and getting results that give your the return you need.

Will Your Marketing Be Affected by the Good Enough Revolution?

Not so long ago, about 181 million cheap, disposable cameras were selling in the US, compared with around 7 million digital cameras. Evaluation discovered that customers would sacrifice lots of quality for a cheap, convenient device. Given the hassle it was to get film footage off cameras and onto a computer for editing and sharing, the videocam market was open to a cheaper, simpler video camera - the Flip Ultra. The camcorder captured relatively low-quality 640 X 480 footage at a time when the more high-end, high quality companies were launching camcorders capable of recording in 1080 hi def. The demand for cheap, fast, and simple, i.e. Good Enough, is increasing.

News comes from blogs, long-distance calls can be made on Skype, we can watch video on small computer screens rather than TV and many are moving to low-power netbook-computers that are just good enough to meet needs. Technology has increased the consumer and business appetite for flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. The term "high-quality" is changing. From medicine to the military, the rise of Good Enough is becoming rampant. We can even get more music into our computers at a manageable size with MP3 technology. The music business has changed.

Web tools are succeeding because they are Good Enough. Ease of use, continuous availability and low price are becoming more critical. Even the military has jumped on the bandwagon — consider the MQ-1 Predator with a top speed of 135 miles per hour. The ability to maintain a constant presence in the air is possible because the aircraft is cheap to build, can fly for more than 20 hours straight, doesn't require pilots who need sleep, food and bathroom breaks, and who might die if shot down. The Good Enough theory is being applied all over the place. Look at elawyering, virtual trade shows inhabited by avatars, and health care one-stop shops.

How might all of this work? The application of the Pareto principle. 20 percent of the effort, features, or investment might deliver 80 percent of the value to consumers. So I ask you, is your marketing being affected by the Good Enough Revolution? Are you sacrificing quality for speed of delivery? Information for this blog was excerpted from the September 2009 issue of WIRED, articled entitled The Good Enuf Rvlutn, starting on page 110. I recommend reading it in its entirety!!