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5 Easy Steps to a Balanced Marketing Mix
 In the last issue, Are You Online Too Much?, I talked about four major areas of marketing: three offline (print/direct mail; phone; and personal networking); and one online (social media/e-marketing).
If you went through the exercise, you know what your percentages are-how much time you are currently spending with each. Maybe you found out that you were hanging out online too much and you need to get out more. Or maybe you are a "helicopter marketer," spending lots of time hovering over and around people, but not making friends and building credibility with blogs and other social media.
This week, we look at creating a plan, a calendar, that will help you achieve a healthy marketing mix, the sort of balance that will produce results for you.
5 Easy Steps
1. Map out your goals by marketing area. It might be as simple as: 1. Print: send out regular postcards and coupons by direct mail; 2. Phone: start calling some of my current clients for a friendly "check-in" and do phone follow-up after each networking event; 3. Personal networking: attend in-person business networking events; 4. Social media and e-marketing: start commenting on other people's blogs and write e-zine articles for directories.
2. Attach numbers to your goals by marketing area. Taking the above sample, the numbers for print might be: send out one postcard a month to current clients and one postcard a month to prospects. For social media, you might block out 10 minutes a day, or a half day on Fridays, depending on the importance you have placed on it. And so on.
3. Create a marketing calendar. You can do this easily in Microsoft Word, using the tables.
4. Carve out 15 minutes a day to work your program. This is the important part. If you do something on your plan for fifteen minutes, you will see results. My fifteen minutes comes out first thing each morning, before I get sucked into my day.
5. Track your results. A simple check-off of an activity and the time spent on it does two things: it gives you an enormous sense of satisfaction (remember the stickers you got in second grade?) and it helps you see where you spent your time and what you got out of it.
There you go. Five easy steps to a balanced marketing plan.
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