What are you doing for marketing?

I was revisiting this over the long weekend while everyone else was out enjoying the holidays. It's great. Holidays are actually the only time I get to think quietly about the "big picture" for PeerFX.

So here's what we're doing for marketing:

1. Website
2. E-mails
3. Press Releases
4. Facebook
5. Twitter
6. Adwords
7. Youtube
8. Blog
9. Online game

There might be even more than that but that's just off the top of my head. We've been so involved with the day to day operations of the company that we haven't slowed down to figure out exactly what we want each of these channels to do. Specific channels may be more effective for distributing information such as press releases, special promos, etc. Whereas other venues can focus on branding, customer-relationship building, etc.

I went through the exercise of listing the above marketing channels, labeled each of them "push" or "pull" (which just means whether you're pushing your product DOWN through your distributors via discounts to the vendors, etc. or if you're pulling your customers to you via promos to end-users, etc. there are may examples of push and pull in marketing) and also the function that I expected each of these channels to be responsible for.

Then evaluate each channel on its effectiveness based on conversion rate to actual transactions (or whatever is applicable in your case indicating a "sale" of some sort that generates revenue)

At the end of this you should have a clearer picture of where you should be spending more effort and money to promote and hopefully have a more consistent branding/marketing strategy - remember, you should always have an overarching objective that you're trying to achieve.

Get specific - is your strategy supposed to get you 200 new customers (actual conversion)? or simply spread the word to 20000 new potential customers (awareness)?