A certain member of my family has always given the impression that they believe the best way to lose weight is to buy magazines about diets. Similarly, in marketing it’s often easier to decide on some new technology-driven approach than to actually do the basics. There’s a never-ending conveyor belt of sales and marketing IT ‘solutions’ which are really just management tools. They won’t do the job for us.
What we really need to do is to get stuff done, and for most people that means setting out schedules and hitting targets. Write articles, make videos, monitor advertising… whatever it is we know we should do more of, we need to start getting that done before we invest in management tools.
Lots of marketing managers will be building schedules for next year over the next few weeks. It’s a great time to get more detailed and allocate resources (whether time or money) to more granular activities too, to make sure we actually get enough of these done.