Is Your Tree Bearing Fruit?
By Sandra Pearce, MPA Media Marketing Manager
I'm going to get philosophical for a minute but I promise it will totally relate to your marketing efforts. Everything is connected. Yes, I went there. You see, I view business as a tree and marketing as what makes it grow. Now, I don't believe this just because my career is marketing. Although I do admit I'm a bit biased. Analogies tend to work better for me than definitions, like this one. According to the American Marketing Association, this is the definition of marketing: "Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large." You can probably guess why I like analogies instead.
A good marketing communications plan contains so many pieces that it's often hard to stay focused and ensure that everything you do is connected and that each element feeds off, and on, one another. A tree as an analogy for planting the right seeds, staying rooted, planning your crop and being fruitful just seems to fit.
So let's get started with the seeds. The seeds are your products, your service, your people and your culture; essentially they are all the things that make up the essence of your company. These are what your tree will grow from. Now, if your product development people think you need an elm tree, and your marketing people think you need a cedar tree, and your sales people think they need an oak tree, then you'll probably wind up with a bush. If you want to grow something vibrant, alive and that will thrive, you all need to be on the same page about what you're growing before you start.
So let's assume that you all agree on what kind of tree you're growing and talk about what comes next, the fertilizer. Yes, I went there too. To make something grow you need the right ingredients. In this case you need a marketing communications plan. You need to feed your tree. I like a very well balanced blend of fertilizer myself. It should contain brand development, customer engagement, referral programs, customer retention plans and the all important sales, renewal, up-sell, cross-sell pipeline development.
It's not enough to expect your marketing plan to get new customers. It must help you keep the ones you have. You see, marketing isn't just ads. It is every single thing that touches your current and future customers. Now that we have planted the seed and fertilized the soil, let's take a look at what fruit this can bear: Customers.
If we do our jobs well, then our tree will bear more for us over time. Just as the first harvest of a tree is not usually the biggest or the most profitable, the same is true for your company. The important thing to remember is if you want to produce consistent, bigger crops over time your tree will need consistent watering, feeding and lest we forget, pruning. If you start to grow in a direction that doesn't suit how you want it to, cut the branch off or prune it back.
And if what you're doing isn't getting the results you think you should be getting, maybe it's time to rethink your fertilizer mix. Don't be afraid to add to it, take something away or just change the how much of each you use.
So let's wrap this up the way it began, with a really bad pun. You reap what you sow.
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