An interesting post by Steve Johnson talks about marketing not being a list, but rather an approach to solving customers problems and helping buyers to buy.
As marketers, we sometimes fall victims of the routine day-to-day tactical activities and forget why we are doing them. Create this email here, prepare a webinar there, and send the artwork for publication in that magazine. Do you ever stop at some point during the week to rethink your actions, rethink your role, rethink your strategy?
Being tuned to the market and being able to notice patterns is only possible if you do your job with eyes wide open. You don’t necessarily have to keep looking for this with everything you do at every minute (it would drive you crazy and slow you down considerably) but just recognizing the need for it does help.
Here are some actions you can take that might help:
- After you create a presentation, review it thinking not only on who you will be presenting it to, but now thinking about whether more people in your market (customers and prospects) would find it interesting/educational
- When you wrap up things for the day, think back at everything you created (collateral, presentations, copy, etc.) and make a note to revise it and expand it to become a piece you can repurpose for another audience
- Make a point to touchbase with the sales reps every month and ask them what they are seeing in the market and what questions they are being asked
- Schedule a couple hours per week (Friday afternoons are usually great) to review the week that passed and to plan for the week ahead, with the idea that what you will be working on, producing, and publishing should be solving a customer problem
How are YOU tackling the challenge of noticing patterns and solving customers problems?
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