When we look at a beautiful flower, we can appreciate how nature has made everything in the flower perfect for us to enjoy. From the texture of the pedals to the depth of the color. When writing for customers and prospects, we need to appear authentic and natural to them in all of our communications. This starts with our thinking about our customers and continues with our writing.
Businesses come in all shapes and sizes. Their marketing plans are similarly diverse and the sophistication of plan often has no relation to the size of the company or the markets they serve. There are certain marketing fundamentals that apply no matter what your business or your target markets and prospects. While we need to paint a vision for our prospects, maybe they do want to sail into the sunset, we also need to focus on those fundamentals that will let us communicate our vision.
I wrote in my last blog post Vision, Goals, and Actions about how critical it is to take a time out, create a vision for your company, and then plan the five year, one year, and next quarter plans, complete with measurable key productivity indicators. This post is about those key productivity indicators.
In 1995, I created a web site for Robelle, which was the 80,000th registered web site with CERN (there were 250,000 six months later). In 1996, I created a personal web site. Linkedin recently sent me an email congratulating me on being one of the first one million registered users of Linkedin (there are 100 million today). Facebook got me around 2007. I started twittering a year or two ago.
When sailing, you need to constantly adjust the sails to the current wind conditions. If the wind changes one way, you need to grind on the winch and pull the sail in. If the wind alters direction the opposite way, you need to let off some line so that sail can let the wind push itself out.