Today we are pleased to feature the Founder and CEO of KickFire Marketing, Janelle Page. As an expert marketer, Janelle has been the architect of successful and strategic, laser beam focused marketing campaigns for businesses large and small for over a decade. Janelle is a highly sought after marketing consultant and a popular speaker. She travels around the nation teaching marketing bootcamps to business owners and is regularly featured in industry magazines and the press for her business acumen and marketing expertise.
Small Business Trendsetters: Do you believe that using certain marketing tools such as pay-per-click, search engine optimization, or video marketing can actually hurt your chances of success?
Janelle Page: Well, that is an interesting question. Those are all great tools that you mentioned and they aren’t going to necessarily hurt the chances at success unless decision makers allow lackluster results to cause them to swear off marketing altogether, or to stop investing a reasonable amount in their marketing efforts. Every tool serves a purpose in a blueprint or schematic strategy, and every piece of the marketing structure needs the right placement to be effective. A good analogy of managing a marketing structure is an army commander at war who is full of battle tactics. He’s using frontal assaults, flank attacks, aerial drops and artillery blasts, but with no overall strategy. Sure he may kill some of the enemy, but without an overall strategy, he’s going to waste a whole lot of his own resources (in both munitions and soldier’s lives) and not be as effective and efficient as he would if he had a clear objective and tactics that each play a piece in achieving that objective.
If the commander creates a plan that integrates all of his tactics such as softening up the enemy with a bunch of aerial bombings, followed by a pounding with heavy artillery blasts and then simultaneously launches frontal and flank attacks, well, now he’s got a well-coordinated attack. That’s how it is in marketing. Every marketing tool should play a laser-focused, defined roll in the overall strategy. Your pay-per-click campaign shouldn’t be disjointed from your video marketing or social media. If you are going to create a great video, what is the purpose of your video? Will you use it on your landing pages to convert traffic that you are driving to your site with your pay-per-click campaigns? What will be the call to action on the video or landing page? Once you’ve paid to generate traffic to your site, do you have a plan in place to collect that visitors’ information so that if they don’t decide to become a customer today, you can continue to remarket to them in the future? All these matters need to be considered and planned for in advance.
Small Business Trendsetters: What are other questions that need to be answered when developing an effective comprehensive marketing strategy?
Janelle Page: The purpose of a marketing strategy is for the business owner to generate leads that the sales staff can turn into conversions. So questions that need to be asked and answered include: Do you have a follow up system in place? If your SEO is successful and you have organic traffic coming to your site, do you have an easy to navigate website with clear, concise, compelling copy? Do you have video that helps your site visitors come to know, like and trust you? If your product or service isn’t a great fit for a particular site visitor, do you offer enough value and/or great information that they may refer others who are a better fit to your business? You don’t want to be that business owner who has tactics and no strategy, or tools and no blueprint. It’s a colossal waste of resources. Get a governing game plan and you will find that marketing works.
Small Business Trendsetters: In your experience, what is the one thing that someone must consider to successfully market their business?
Janelle Page: Begin with the end in mind. By that I mean knowing what it is you want to accomplish and then creating a strategy for achieving exactly that. Recognizing that marketing products are just tools. And tools, without a blueprint, won’t help you build a profitable, wildly successful business.
To discover more about “the art of war and marketing” from Janelle Page visit http://www.kick-fire.com where you can learn how to build a marketing blueprint for your business.