Sean Romanoff Communications

Any journalism student – or parent of a young child – is familiar with these important questions. They are part of the big six questions a writer often tries to answer in the lead of an article. But these are the essential questions when it comes to your marketing as well. They can be applied on a small scale to any individual project, or on a large scale to an entire marketing or business plan. But if you don’t pay attention to them, you’re leaving far too much to chance.

Why? – This question gets to your purpose. And it should be specific. Are you trying to increase sales? Generate qualified leads? Affect your reputation through thought leadership? Improve customer service? If you don’t know why you’re doing something, you’ve stumbled before you’ve before you’ve gotten out of the starting gate.

Who? – Once you have a purpose, you should quickly determine your audience. Is it new customers? Old customers? Distributors? Peers? Do you have multiple audiences? Answers to these questions will affect your style and tone, among other things.

What? – You have a message. Is it clear and concise? What you have to say should be easily understood and get to a specific point. You may have lots of things to say, but those messages can be covered through another medium on another day.

How? – Speaking of medium…you should give some thought about the best way to reach your audience. These days there are so many online opportunities, it’s tough to argue against taking advantage of many of them. They allow you to be efficient and cost-effective with your marketing.

Even if you aren’t the kind of person who likes to plan, just by answering these four simple questions you give yourself a much better chance to succeed than if you just wing it. And how.

If there’s a buzzword in online marketing these days it’s social media. Although most businesses sense there’s something important going on, they’re not really sure how social media can help them.  I’ll use a project I’m currently working on as an example of how just a limited amount of social media networking can get the word out.

I’m currently working a joint venture with two other marketing consultants to bring more business to a local special improvement district. In the process we managed to get 42 businesses to participate in a Valentine’s week event where businesses will offer discounts, events, and entertainment to attract more people to the area.  It sounds great…and it is great. Except that we have no budget to speak of.

That means publicity has to come cheaply – and by cheap I mean free.

So I’ve gone to Facebook for help. Each day this week I’ve posted some tidbit about the event and lo and behold I’m getting a lot of questions about it.  Plus I’ve posted notices and flyers on several online message boards around town (I freely admit my town is wired – in a good way).  Already we’re seeing that just by approaching our limited list of friends and neighbors,  networking on social media sites is going make the reality of this event much more likely to reach it’s potential.

We haven’t asked for anything.  We’ve just given information about what’s available and we’ve made it seem like it should be a fun week in this neighborhood.  We’re creating interest.  And as interest grows, we’ll create a community of loyal customers.

I’ll keep you up to date with how the event is going, and how social media marketing made a difference.

SO HERE I AM!

Well, it took me long enough, but I’ve finally made my triumphant return to blogging! My old blog, Copywriting Truths, served an important purpose as far as I’m concerned, which was to sift through so many of the claims made by businesses whose goal is to separate would-be writers from their money.

Well that mission will continue to be served on another new blog of mine called Freelance Copywriter’s Resource. So if you’re looking for that kind of info from me again — that’s where you’ll find it.

Marketing Rocket Fuel is a blog that will give daily tips for how you can launch your marketing in a more powerful way. Rocket fuel has enough juice to push objects, large objects, through our atmosphere, trumping gravity, all the way to space. That’s the kind of information I want to share here.

So come back every day! Soon you’ll find a sign-up box on my site that will let you get this information delivered directly to you by email, but feel free to add me to your RSS feed in the meantime.

I think this is going to be an amazing little experiment, and I hope you much more out of it than I do.