Comments on: Marketing…who’s got time for that? (Step 3)

By: E-Commerce Guidebook

E-Commerce Guidebook — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 10:08:57 +0000

Outstanding article. There’s a lot of great information here, though I did want to let you know something – I am running Ubuntu with the up-to-date beta of Opera, and the look and feel of your blog is kind of rakish for me. I can figure out the articles, but the navigation doesn’t function so solid.

By: greg

greg — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 01:11:13 +0000

Yes, the necessary distinction between marketing efforts for a bricks-and-mortar business with an online presence versus a purely online business is difficult to define.

exactly

By: Affiliate Millionaire

Affiliate Millionaire — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:42:25 +0000

Yes, the necessary distinction between marketing efforts for a bricks-and-mortar business with an online presence versus a purely online business is difficult to define.

So many of us IM folks do all of the marketing ourselves. Having blogs like this is actually helpful as it can be really difficult to be objective about one’s own investment in marketing efforts.

Thanks!

By: Queen of Health and Beauty

Queen of Health and Beauty — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 22:08:38 +0000

When it’s really busy add more marketing hours to your schedule. Sound counter-intuitive? Well it’s not. The reason you experience dramatic peaks and valleys in revenue is because when it’s super busy…you’re not planting the seeds of new business. (Make your salespeople follow that rule for cold calls and such…the results are dramatic) Take more time off when it’s slow to compensate. < i totally agree

By: Online Marketing Hamburg

Online Marketing Hamburg — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:57:30 +0000

I think the question is, what kind of marketing we are talking about. As Online Marketing Manager I can tell you that postion 1 – 3 for important keywords in the Google Search is invaluable. Especially in Germany where Google has a market share of more than 90%. To reach such rankings much time for online marketing is necessary.

Greetings from Germany

By: waxmarketing

waxmarketing — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 12:35:03 +0000

A full pipeline is so important! It’s not that you shouldn’t budget your marketing to keep that pipeline coming in – again we’re distinguishing between a budget and your time. The longer the sales cycle the less impact marketing has on bringing in clients vs sales (to me they are very different beasts) . For example, aprofessional services firm selling large projects wins most of their business based on relationships and the reputation of the company. That’s something that can be reinforced by marketing and if they’re a large company, SHOULD be. A solopreneur might close new customers in one meeting…hence more time on finding them via marketing! However a smaller business that may sell widgets to Target, is going to spend most of their time in selling those widgets to Target and probably gains less ROI from ads or direct mail.

Another way to do it would be to calculate how many of your customers come in through marketing (ads, direct mail, etc again vs sales) and apportion your time accordingly there. The days of using a ‘rule of thumb’ percentage of revenue for determining marketing budget are over. Thank you for bringing that up I probably need to be more careful to make the distinction between sales and marketing.

By: Small Business Marketing

Small Business Marketing — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 04:14:07 +0000

How much time should you spend on a weekly basis doing marketing and promotion tasks?
Not enough!

In some ways that’s good because I’m busy working for clients – but I have to say, I don’t necessarily agree that marketing time and investment should be inversely proportional to sales cycle time. Really, they’re not linked like that.

Even a long sales cycle requires a full pipeline, and most companies have an “average” sales cycle – but that doesn’t mean someone can come through the door and buy today when typically it takes 6 months.

Marketing effort should be commensurate with it’s percent of budget and ROI.