If you do a lot of corporate and business promotions, then you have probably spent some time looking for icons to use as a visual aid to your narrative. One icon that’s almost synonymous with marketing is the megaphone
As part of the sales kick-off for 2021, I led a thorough review of what we did the past year. In 2020 our team beat our qualified lead target by 220%. Our strategy and tactics across each marketing channel mirrored the overall results.
What did we do in marketing?
For starters, we never once sent out a nurture email, a newsletter, placed an ad on LinkedIn, or created a piece of content that was not packed with value for our readers. We brought value by being thoughtful about what our clients cared about at this time, addressed each of these needs with researched content that prompted them to think about the solution in creative ways, and shared them in channels that were least disruptive. We shared white papers that offered a guide on how to think about economic recovery with data, and what data to use. We created communities of practice to promote peer-to-peer sharing. We created a covid working group to bring clients who were leading in their communities to share the innovative work they were doing to prompt others to do the same. We created over 7 case studies highlighting the innovative work government leaders were doing. We held roundtables at events with data-driven gov executives to facilitate a conversation amongst them to foster the exchange of important ideas.
The central theme to our approach can be summarized in 3 bullets
- Don’t promote
- Make every interaction count
- Be helpful
Prospect attention is a valuable currency. Never take it for granted and treat it as something you earn and make yourself worthy of.
In today’s information overload era, good marketers are not the ones who are loudest, instead, they are the ones who humbly chug away at creating value.
Right now, I am changing my preferred icon for marketing to reflect the same!
