Today’s topic is titled, your marketing bag of tricks.

I want to give you some content, thoughts, and some ideas around how and when it makes sense to try out some things that you may have had sidelines and how you actually keep track of some of these random ideas, as well.

So if you’re like me, you will have no shortage of miscellaneous ideas on a day to day basis.

Normally, the first step that I personally realized was, I needed to make sure that I had some way to clear them out of my head and get them into an organized fashion. The reason behind that was that I found if I didn’t get them out of my head, I would just be constantly thinking about all these random ideas 24/7. I’d be lying in bed thinking about this idea and saying “maybe I should look at doing this, maybe I should look at doing that”—like it was an absolute disaster.

So, what I started to do was look at some of the different tools that I could use to keep myself a little bit more organized with these random ideas.

First off, I tried carrying around a really small notepad in my back pocket and a pen in my other pocket, but that just for me wasn’t a good solution. Then, I started sending emails to myself saying “hey, consider this take a look at that”. That was okay, at first, but then it still seems to be a little bit hard to go in shuffle through things.

Finally, what I settled on was using a tool called Evernote, which is very similar to a Microsoft tool called OneNote. What I didn’t realize with Evernote was that you can email things right to Evernote so they will instantly pop up and filter themselves accordingly.

So I created a tag called “perhaps”, which is really meant to be all of the random ideas I have that don’t have to be something that has to be acted on immediately. It’s one of those that perhaps, in the future, we would look at executing or it’s something that I should consider doing.

So this category of “perhaps” allowed me to really start to empty my brain and I use it every single day. I mean, I’ve already used it two or three times today. What I do then is once a month, I go through and do one of a couple of things—I delete things that I think are just terrible ideas.

The second one is I put a timeline on something. So I may say, “revisit in 30 days”, “revisit in 90 days”, “revisit in a year or two years”.

Or, the last one is that as I’m scrolling through, I see something that I should put into action sooner than later. And I tag those with “perhaps important” so that I know that I want to then scroll through, let’s just say that you’ve got 100 things and perhaps, and 10 of them are labeled “important”.

To summarize, here’s how I organize the “perhaps” tags in Evernote on a monthly basis:

Delete ideas that do not make sense

Assign timelines to the ideas
Re-tag as “perhaps important” to those that need to be actioned upon immediately sooner

Now I use the perhaps tag in a little bit more of a general fashion where I’m putting any ideas related to growth. Eventually, what I started doing is tagging things “perhaps important marketing”.

So marketing, hiring, growth, accounting or financial—I started to add different tags. What it ends up looking like—as you start to execute this—you could have a tag that says “perhaps important”, or “perhaps 30 days, 60 days, or 90 days”, and then a tag of “marketing”.

Those marketing ones are where I start to come up with this bag of marketing tricks. Because usually, these are things that you’re going to see your competitors doing. There’s something that’s interesting that you might see for completely unrelated business. So, like if I’m out and about driving, and I see a really interesting billboard, I might just say, “perhaps use this tagline”, for example. There’s basically a lot of different options and ideas to how to really start to use this.

BAG OF MARKETING TRICKS IDEAS:

Compile the list of all the random ideas who wanted to potentially execute

Prioritize the ideas based on potential business impact

Categorized or rank those ideas based on costs

Track the outcome

What I’m looking for is initially for you to do a really big brain clearing to get all of those random ideas that you’ve thought about doing, but you’ve never wanted to move into action. What ends up happening is when I really analyze and look at small businesses, you’ve got to do just a full brain clearing of anything and everything that you have wanted to potentially execute—from events to certain emails. You want it to try your press releases or collaborations, joint ventures, all those different things. I literally want you to go through and just compile this massive list.

And from there, I want you to start to then prioritize it based on a variety of different factors, but I like to prioritize it off of potential business impact. Obviously, if you haven’t executed the tactic yet, you’re not going to know the potential business impact but you can at least use your best judgment.

Let’s say you’ve thought about changing up your company’s attire. Is that going to have a high, medium, or low potential impact? I would probably argue dependent but most likely that has a low impact. However, if you’ve been talking about adding 20 pages to your website and it just never has gotten around to it, I could argue that that impact could be much higher.

So I want you to start to just get this list and just start to work through the list and start to prioritize. Now again, I personally like to prioritize based on potential business impact, you could prioritize based on the fastest, you could implement some of these things. You could categorize them or rank them based on how much something costs. So is it free? Is it going to be very expensive? You might say, “perhaps we need to have an electronic sign versus the old fashioned sign that we want but geez, that’s $29,000”, for example, although I still want that on your perhaps list.

What I’m aiming to see as you go through this exercise is I want the cream to start to rise to the top and I want you to start to see some of the different tactics that you can start to execute.

The goal is to really find, I mean six to 12 different tactics that you can look at executing over the next six months. And, what I like to do is make sure that you have your month to month planned out. If you haven’t gone through the episode where I gave you my monthly marketing calendar, please go through that. You should be planning that 30 days in advance so that you have the month ahead, ready to go so that you have that predictability of leads, income, or inbound calls, and all those different things. But then when I’m looking for you to do is to sprinkle in one or two of those, “perhaps” tactics out of your marketing bag of tricks on a monthly basis.

What you’re going to do is you’re going to make sure that you give it your best effort because I’m aiming to start to see if there are some things that are on this “perhaps” list that should be a reoccurring marketing tactic. And you’re going to execute it again, execute the best you can.

If there are some financial resources that you need to put, make sure you put those financial resources to that particular tactic as well. I want you to grade that after about 30 days of the tactic being executed—you’re going to look at it in a very black and white way. Did it drive some traction? By traction, I mean, revenue or lead—yes or no? If yes, then I want you to move that ahead. I want you to look at doing that again, and again and again, and I want you to keep refining that. If the answer is no, you want to make sure you relook at it. Is there something that you potentially missed in that particular tactic that you didn’t execute flawlessly? If there was nothing that you missed, then great if you tried that tactic, you’ve got something else from your bag of tricks next month so that you’re constantly innovating.

Because the challenge is that marketing can get stale pretty quickly. And the whole growth rule is that you want to make sure you’re getting lots and lots of eyeballs, you want to make sure that you’re front and center on a regular basis. If you’re not changing things up, if you’re not appearing everywhere, you’re going to potentially run into some different challenges. So you’ve got to make sure that you are everywhere, and to stay everywhere you’ve got to be trying new tactics each and every month.

So follow this formula. Gather your ideas, start to prioritize them, and then work them into your calendar so that you’re executing one or two of these each and every month you’re tracking the outcome. You’re doing more if it worked, you’re stopping it and trying something else if it didn’t, but the key here is to take strategic action.

Get out there, make a change, and take some action.