There are at least 46 different marketing practices around. There really are! From this set of knowledge one could imagine there would be one that got marketing right. One practice that just nails how marketing should be handled. One practice that gives you the knowledge needed to be a great marketer. But no, there really isn’t.
From Guerrilla marketing and social media marketing to permission marketing, cross-media marketing and shopper marketing the world is filled with marketing definitions, books and guidelines – and of course gurus – on the varied marketing practices. All geared toward telling you the best way to market your business, products or services. All geared towards defining the set of most important tools you should use and the absolute key processes you should set to achieve your targets.
All of them fail to deliver.
The 46 Marketing Practices You Just Cannot Ignore.
The list of different marketing practices that all define the thought process, tools, processes, skills, channels, metrics, etc. is extensive. It includes these 46 marketing practices and activities you just cannot ignore (and most probably many more):
- Guerrilla marketing
- Social media marketing
- Online marketing
- Viral marketing
- Retail marketing
- Buzz marketing
- Direct marketing
- Search engine marketing
- Product marketing
- Brand marketing
- Loyalty marketing
- Mobile marketing
- Location-based marketing
- Shopper marketing
- Digital marketing
- Drip marketing
- Database marketing
- Relationship marketing
- Industrial marketing
- Permission marketing
- Social marketing
- Services marketing
- Right-time marketing
- Real-time marketing
- Multicultural marketing
- Affinity Marketing
- Article marketing
- Affiliate marketing
- Cause marketing
- Close Range Marketing
- Cloud marketing
- Communal marketing
- Community marketing
- Consumer-generated marketing
- Content marketing
- Cross-media marketing
- Diversity marketing
- Defensive marketing
- Multi-level marketing
- Ethical marketing
- Evangelism marketing
- Diversity marketing
- Megamarketing
- Reality marketing
- Next-best-action marketing
- Undercover marketing
This Is The Most Important Marketing Practice!
Do these starts for a marketing book sound any familiar: “previously…”, “you cannot anymore ignore….”, “it has been proven that…”, “modern companies…”, “in todays global competitive marketplace…”, and my favorite, “the best practice organizations…”. I thought they might.
Every single marketing practice there is, if you read about it, is the most important there is. It is the one and only practice without which no modern organisation or self-respecting marketer can live without. The one practice without you and your company are surely doomed to the under-performers’ hell.
All the marketing practices, the 46+, are trying to define and hone your thought process. A noble goal, I should say. They are all trying to give you the ultimate set of strategies, tactics and tools you need and should use to reach your goals. All the while failing to deliver. Failing to deliver, because of their all encompassing, single minded goal of trying to define the thought processes and tools you should use to market, the tools you should use to sell you product.
In defining the toolset you should use to solve your main problem as a marketer – how to sell more – the marketing practices end up severely restricting your toolset. And lets be honest, if you stop and think about it for a while, most of the marketing practices you know, and most of the 46 ones listed above, are defining an extremely small niche of activities.
In reality, any marketing practice defining a set of activities you should pursue is wrong!
Action → Sales = Good Action.
Any action that helps you to sell more is a good marketing action, the best action is the one that gets the best results with least costs. It can be any action. It can be an in-store promotion, an e-mail, an event at a conference, a TV advert, Twitter post or a one-to-one meeting with a client. It can be any action that aims to increase your sales. The increased sales can happen in short term or in a longer term, but they need to increase as a cause of the actions you are taking.
If you derive the set of tools you are using to reach your only true marketing goal from any one marketing practice, you are with utmost certainty missing 99% of the potential you have to reach and engage your target audience. You miss on creativity of your approaches, on the channels you use and on the messages you deliver. You miss the key point it means to be a marketer: to find ways to sell more.
Do not use the predefined thought processes. Do not succumb to the marketing brainwash.
Be bold, be brash, be conservative or be personal. But always, think for yourself and remember to deliver.
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*the image of the bookshelf is originally presented at freedavidwong.org