What works in marketing? Getting the marketing basics right.

Basic marketing success tenets do reveal themselves over time. And while they seem like “common sense” once you know them, they are not emphasized enough.

Get the Basics Right. Really Right.

Small and medium sized business marketers are exposed to so many temptations (and office politics) and trends and technologies. With all this possibility it's really easy to be bad at the most basic and effective marketing tactics. Somewhere in all the “shiny object technologies”, and the demands of accomplishing "what we always do" it's easy to miss the most basic tried and true, and frankly dominant, marketing tenets.

I dare say that most small and medium sized companies marketing strategy consists of figuring out how much effort and expense to put into different types of marketing. That's the entire strategy. They don't really work hard on message and results. They work hard on shiny objects, and office politics, and conveying to their management (who demand this of them) that they have the right recipe of effort and activities.

So they tell management, (via their marketing budget) "we'll do a pint of advertising, and two cups of website, a cup of pay per click, two teaspoons of SEO, and we'll mix that all in a two gallon trade show budget and voila! That's the recipe for marketing success!

Except the messages aren't strong and no one really knows if anything actually works.

I believe that getting "the basics" of brand promise and message right... really right... is 90% of the job.

And even I..... need to be reminded.

This reminds me.

Check out this blog post by fellow Charlottean Patrick E. McLean at this link

I think he nails it. And oh...

Don't avoid the obvious.

Make "the basic" messages very very very very (did I mention very) strong and repeat them everywhere.

THEN, go test how the shiny objects actually effectively convey the basic messages.

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