A sneak preview into your next marketing meeting...

Here is the agenda for your next marketing meeting:

Item 1 – We haven’t got any money for marketing
Item 2 – Please refer to item 1

See? And you were planning on taking up valuable minutes of your day to have a meeting. Look at the time you’ve saved!

In the last week alone, I have spoken with countless companies who seem to have had this very meeting. They get a lot of really good ideas together, phone around for quotes, organise samples, negotiate better prices and then WHAM! They get told by their bosses that there is no money to be spent on marketing.

Is that going to happen in your next meeting? Are you asking for quotes right now, safe in the knowledge that you are actually allowed to buy anything at all? I don’t want to sound bitter, but I am, so that’s how it’s going to come across.

Here’s a scenario for you. What if I told you that if you spent £5000 with me today, that I could turn it in to £25,000 within 2 months and what’s more, if I didn’t, I would give you all of your money back? Now remember, you’ve just been told that you have NO money to spend on marketing. Do you think that £5000 might just magically appear from somewhere? You bet it would.

Now wind things back a little bit. I don’t have a magical means of turning that £5000 into £25000. Or do I? You see before all this credit crunch, monster munch, lordy help me please nonsense hit, people all over the world believed in marketing. They spent money to increase their company’s exposure. They couldn’t necessarily show you a spreadsheet pointing to how their marketing spend had been converted into revenue, but they knew that it had.

So why did they stop believing? Fear – that’s why. People lose faith in all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, and then as soon as everything is alright again, that faith is restored. Funny thing though – that thing you stopped believing in didn’t go away just because you stopped believing.

It’s a bit like the fairies in Peter Pan. For those of you not familiar (oh don’t act like you don’t know) if you stop believing in fairies, they die. It’s slightly different in business – if you stop believing in marketing, YOU die.

Marketing yourselves properly now is more vital than ever. I read some good advice this week that I would like to share with you. Don't think of words like "advertising" or "marketing" - those have negative feelings attached to them. Think instead of words like "increased exposure", "greater market share", or "more profits". Now that I have given you that warm fuzzy feeling, go and find me that £5000 we were talking about!

Food for thought, but then so is salmon.