Understanding Not Only the Idea of Marketing but, More Importantly, the Goal
SUMMARY
Note the differences between the idea and the goal of marketing. The concept of marketing involves reaching the target audience, while the goal of marketing is to create an executable plan that focuses on a specific timeline, an integrated campaign, and ideal markets. The objective is to create a marketing plan with specific tasks and goals and identify the target audience to get the most return on investment. One needs to create a physical marketing plan to succeed in marketing in the modern age.
EXPANDED DISCUSSION
Most everyone understands the idea of marketing, but sometimes I wonder if many attempting to do it know the marketing goal. These are two completely different concepts.
I love the time that we are in. I love the access. I love the tools. It’s a beautiful time to be in marketing. When American Blackguard, my company, started marketing Hollywood films and publisher’s books several decades ago, there were few options compared to what we have today. There were ad buys and public relations. This is an overgeneralization but a simplified version of the limited facts. These days, with the global and focused reach of the Internet, we have so many more options open to us as marketers than we did decades ago. I love it. I love the ease. I love the access. I love the opportunities.
Technology is running at a terrific pace. Almost every other day, I hear of a new avenue for marketing that has opened, new channels of reaching designated people interested in the product we are trying to share with them. The industry is changing and changing quickly. Because of technology, power is moving towards the individual, and if you know anything about my philosophy, I love anything that equals the playing field for all players. Reaching the people we want to reach and those who desire us to connect with them (it works both ways) is the idea of marketing. In this series, we’ll discuss many of those techniques that I have used with writers to achieve sometimes 1,500% or more growth in the sales of their products. But, again, this is the idea of marketing.
The goal of marketing, however, is different. The goal of marketing is the plan and the implementation. No matter the outlets, there are and have always been three legs of an effective marketing campaign: 1) a doable and executable timeline, 2) an integrated campaign that the entire team can get behind and visualize, and 3) a focus on ideal markets rather than on markets in general.
Everything operates on a timeline. A book or film will be released at a particular time, and we create the marketing plan by working backward. The longer the lead time before the release, the better because more can be accomplished in that plan. You’ll think me crazy, but I think a two-year lead time on a project is ideal. (Most say three months, so I am quite at variance from the opinions of others.) Here’s my thinking. I think publicity and marketing should start when the idea of a book begins or a film gets the studio greenlight. Both will take two years to be released through the traditional machine. So that’s where I get my two-year timeline.
That timeline lets us know the time capital to invest in the proper promotion. Proper promotion is planned. It is not a matter of waking up today (though this works for those spur-of-the-moment social media posts, but for little else) and thinking of how we will market today. A marketing plan uses that backtracked timeline to set up specific and quantifiable tasks and goals that need to be reached to lead to the next goal and task. This plan, when laid out, can go on for pages. Still, the fact that it is written out with definite timelines for completion allows the entire team (even if the team is only you) to get on the same page (literally) and move as a collective unit forward like an army advancing toward the pivotal point (the release of your book or film).
Many beginning writers and filmmakers like to think that their book or movie is for everyone. It is not. Within the marketing plan above, it is always most profitable with our limited resources to target rifle style, our most likely audience for buying this book or film, rather than taking a shotgun approach and diluting our marketing/advertising/public relations monetary funds and time available. In other words, we want to know our target audience and put most of our efforts into reaching that particular audience to get the most return on our investment.
This new age is terrific but comes with a significant learning curve. As you’re thinking of the idea of marketing, don’t forget that what we want to do is focus on those three pillars of the goal of marketing. Authors need to, many times on their own, find the timeline in which they must work, create a specific plan on paper with deadlines that they fully intend to follow and implement, locate their prime markets, and then, as a result, separate themselves from the crowd and determine a pipeline to communicate with their readers (or potential readers) directly. That is the goal of marketing in this modern age. We are a profession that types words into documents. Make sure, along with your manuscript, that you don’t forget to create that all-important document: the physical marketing plan.
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