“The Power of Marketing Systems”

       We hear a lot about online marketing, offline marketing, social media marketing,direct marketing, etc., but we seldom–if ever–hear about marketing systems. A marketing system is a process or strategy, if you will, that combines all of your marketing together with a common goal–get more patients/customers. It’s usually made up of components that telegraph your marketing  message in a variety of media (e.g. website, social media, direct mail, magazine ads, etc.) all with the same end–brand awareness with the overall message: BUY FROM ME.

       The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “system” as: “a group of related parts that move or work together”. A marketing system therefore, is the same thing. The “related parts” may include website SEO and traffic generation, a social media strategy, a blog, putting up videos related to your business or practice on YouTube, writing articles for a trade journal, etc. 

       Instead of a mish mash of just doing things randomly, I started to put various methods that I had tested to work on a regular basis. Marketing as a whole is simply, “test, monitor, adjust” and I still test a lot of things.  But when I find they work, I keep doing them.  As I find out more and more marketing tools that work, I put them into my system. I learned a long time ago that it was easier to put my marketing on “auto-pilot” so that I didn’t have to constantly chase clients. I wanted a steady stream of prospects putting up their hand to tell me they were interested in what I had to offer instead of chasing them down and trying to sell them. Once they were interested, I could start the sales process.

       Here are 5 ideas for you to put your own marketing system into place:

       1. Get a Buffer account (www.bufferapp.com). Set up social media accounts(if you already haven’t) on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google + and Facebook  and This website will allow you to post all of  your content on all 4 accounts whenever you want—even when you’re sleeping.

       2.  Set up a blog. You can set one up for free at blogger.com or wordpress.com.  Post even once a week about something related to your business/practice and link it back to your website for SEO purposes.

       3.  Post a 2-minute YouTube video every week.  It doesn’t have to be fancy. Even something as simple as speaking into the camera on your laptop on a topic related to your business/practice will suffice. 

       4. Consider a pay-per-click(PPC) campaign. Google makes it fairly easy to set this up and there are books on it as well as tutorials on YouTube that show you how to do it. You go to Google Adwords and set up an account with your ads. Google will post your ads on the pages that are relevant to people who are looking for what you sell. If they click on your ad, you pay Google a certain amount based on several factors such as, how much competition there is, how many people are searching for what you have, local vs. national or international, etc.

       5. Consider “paid” Facebook and Twitter ads. These are very similar to a PPC campaign with Google but for these social media sites they’re set up a little differently. This is something I’m currently testing. 

       The whole point of these tips is to set something up and add to it every week so that your marketing message is hitting the prospects/patients that would want what you offer.  Once your social media profiles, blog and website are set up, it’s just a matter of posting content relevant to your prospects/patients that would benefit them and entice them to buy whatever product or service you’re selling. And remember: ALL of it should have a “call to action”, which I’ll talk about in a future blog post.

       Are you putting a “marketing system” in place?

Best,

Tim