An effective marketing system will bring buyers to your door. But how do you figure out an effective marketing system for your company. Designing and building a marketing system is much like the process which successful stock market investors go through.
Where to start – What does the data say?
How do you start when you don’t know where to start? Just jumping in and performing activities that are in vogue is akin to an investor putting their money into the most fashionable stocks of the day. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the most fashionable stocks of the day often crash, leaving the copy-cat investors with losses.
For successful investors, the real starting point is to look at the data, and analyze and characterize what is happening. A stock market pro will source data that is meaningful to them, establish some assumptions about what will make the stock move, and then build a model to execute the investing strategy.
As a marketer, you need to do the same. Look at the data about your market. And then make some assumptions. Importantly, you are not making assumptions because you are too lazy to get all the data. It is just not possible to get all the data. So you have to supplement the meaningful data that you can gather, with assumptions that fit with this data, and then establish a marketing model. You assumptions will be focused on what will make your customer move towards you.
Build a Model – But Don’t Assume It is Going to Work
For a stock market investor, the focus is on building an investing model that produces repeatable results. But the model will have various components that go into it, and there must be a clear understanding of how the components may interact. For this reason, the investment pro starts with a simple model that can be tested and verified at a smaller scale, before having confidence to put more money into it.
Just the same, the marketer must initiate marketing activities that are to become part of the marketing model, on a small scale. And it is key to test and verify the model and the assumptions that go into it. There is no better validator than the voice of the market itself. A/B testing is what will be provide the real measure of how effective your model is.
Manage Risk and Uncertainty – You Need Marketing Insurance
One very interesting fact about stock market players is that they are very risk averse. They are so wary of the fact that market dynamics could shift against them, with complete surprise. So their model incorporates the shifting nature of the market, and the uncertainty of how things will really turn out. They do this by incorporating various triggered defensive actions, and by using diversification.
As marketers, the same rule applies. No marketing technique will work forever. Current established techniques could fall out of favor. New techniques will emerge. Old techniques will be re-invented. So in evolving a marketing model, you must diversify among a set of marketing activities. And as with the investment pro, you must guard against the shifting nature of the marketplace. Buyer behavior is always changing as the world around them forces them to change.