Ran·dom /ˈrandəm/ adjective — made, done, happening, or chosen without method or conscious decision.
Act /akt/ verb — take action; do something.
Mar·ket·ing /ˈmärkədiNG/ noun — the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.
Ran-dom acts of mar-ket-ing are short burst campaigns intended to advertise, promote, and sell products or services without method or conscious decision. Put — running isolated tactics without a strategic plan. This is when you think and plan tactic-by-tactic and will limit your success and drive up your costs.
It would be best if you broke the cycle of tactic-BY-tactic planning and execution. I have heard it called “burst marketing,” but whatever it’s called, there’s a better way, and it is tactic-TO-tactic. You will produce more value for your audience and optimize your return on marketing investment (ROMI).
To accomplish this, you have to think in parallel and over a longer period of time. I suggest a minimum of 3 years. You will find that this forces you to be honest about where you are today, where you are heading and why and how you plan to get there.
I have come to describe the approach as a rainbow. Please think of the color bands of a rainbow and imagine a timeline of three years underneath it. Each color band should represent a go-to-market message, geography to be entered, new industry to be added. You would then commit to following that band over the three year period. Once you have the color bands defined, you would establish leading performance indicators (LPIs) and key performance indicators (KPIs). These will flow up into your business’s goals.
A great place to start is to define your business’s objective truth. This is different than the goals. Your goals will be owned by sales, marketing, product, geos, etc., and must directly align with the business’s objective. Beneath your goals are the KPIs supported by LPIs.
Be careful as; profit, earnings per share, shareholder value, and the like are not objectives. Those would be goals and are important but differ from an objective because they don’t inspire your brand’s story arc to the world.
Every company has a story and a brand. I use brand here, not as a logo and color code. I mean, it is your company’s culture, people, process, and technology that unite to deliver value to your customers. We tend not to consider our brand a part of demand generation activities. We usually associate branding with logos, business cards, golf shirts with the company name, signs, etc. In the digital age, your brand is everywhere and attracts your audiences’ attention.
As you create awareness of your brand and build credibility and trust, tell your audiences a compelling story that develops over time to which they can emotionally connect, and they will keep coming back. How you do this is by honestly understand who is in your audience and want to bring them the
Think of marketing your business does. Is it “by” or “to”? Does it integrate across all the possible channels? Are activities linked together like a chain? Do you measure progress against baseline or hypothesis over a known amount of time?