Last week we hosted the first CharTec Marketing Lab of our summer season, which was attended by six fabulous business executives from all across the country. Over the course of three days, myself, the CharTec marketing team and the attendees spent our time developing marketing plans, SWOT analyses, objectives, social media pages and plans, a year’s worth of marketing content, and updating the brands of all attendees. It was a wonderful experience for myself as well as my team and we hope the attendees felt the same. While I know that there are tangible elements that the attendees gathered while they were here, the following is a short list of the addition mindsets or thoughts that I hope they learned as well.

 

  1. Sales and marketing requires very different ways of thinking: Here at CharTec, we host both Sales Labs and Marketing Labs, and those of our Members who have been to both, can surely notice the difference. In Sales Lab, you are taught a new process that you practice here on grounds but then have to take home, remember and incorporate to be successful. Marketing Lab on the other hand, is full of projects that you have to complete while you are here in order to get your marketing off of the ground. This speaks a lot to sales and marketing as a whole. Both are equally difficult and equally important. Sales success comes from following the process and guiding conversations through the funnel. Marketing success comes from generating leads and interaction, all driven by the efforts required to create and execute multiple campaigns.
  2. Marketing is not all crayons and brainstorms: While our CharTec marketing department does its fair share of daydreaming, brainstorming, and, yes, coloring; there are a lot of logistics and data that go into the daily marketing tasks that they must complete. Just ask our Marketing Lab attendees that had to put into their ConnectWise, piece by piece, a 28 touch marketing track knows as their yearlong General Interest Track!
  3. Marketing is not flying by the seat of your pants: Effective marketing is not only driven by creativity but also analytics as well. Otherwise, how would we be able to determine our ROI!  Oftentimes people test out marketing by throwing something at the wall and seeing if it sticks. The problem with that is that the likelihood that they’re targeting the wrong target market with the wrong message is extremely high. Put in the right legwork and you are much more likely to be successful.
  4. The work done for social media is front-loaded: It takes significantly longer to create your social media profiles, fill them with all the correct information, and connect them to the right content sources, than it does to manage them on a day to day basis. This is not to say that you can just create your social media page and forget it. Instead, make use of your resources wisely. Fill your profile with relevant articles using things like Feed.ly and Buffer. Make an editorial calendar and use it. You put the hard work into creating the page, now use it!
  5. Marketing can’t all be handled by one person for long: There are idea people, big picture people, and data-driven executors in the modern workplace and marketing requires all three. You need someone that can come up with the content and the ideas as well as someone that is willing to put all of those ideas into practice by actually pushing out said content through the necessary channels. In addition, you also need someone who can then take all of that distributed content and effectively analyze the results to determine what’s working and what isn’t. You aren’t likely to find this in one person.

We know that it can be a bit challenging, albeit not impossible, to effectively run your business while at the same time, maintain a proactive outlook to your marketing efforts. To help, we’ve created a way for you to utilize our marketing resources to fulfill your marketing desires.

Reach out to accountmanager@chartec.net to receive more information on our CharTec Premium Membership offering.