Marketing Is A Game

When someone says “marketing”, what is your immediate gut level reaction?  If you’re an independent professional or small business owner, the very word may fill you with dread.  Here are some of the answers that we’ve gotten from our clients:

• “Marketing is just a different way of saying ’selling’ and I hate to sell!”
• “I don’t have time to market, I’m already too busy!”
• “I’ve tried marketing before and it didn’t work.”
• “It’s too expensive!”
• “I’m a doctor, lawyer, accountant, consultant, business owner…, not a marketer.”

That’s why one of the 7 principles of our marketing program is to overcome these negative mindsets.  To that end, we present marketing as a game.  It has a set of rules, which should be followed in a particular order, and which, if done correctly, will ensure a victory.  The particular game that we use to help clients visualize this, is baseball, except we call it “Marketing Ball”.  Here’s the diagram:

Part 2 will focus on “Spring Training”, the pre-work you’ll need to do before you ever make it to the dugout.