Where you spend your time and money

March 4th, 2006

It always happens. You get excited about new stuff in marketing and you want to get right into it. Over the past few months I have been completely absorbed in the brave new world of blogging, RSS, “tagging”, “Word of Mouth”, search engine marketing and anything else that is online and vaguely marketing related.

I love the potential these technologies, ideas and strategies offer for small and medium business to add real value to their customer relationships and improve the ROI on their advertising dollar.

There are stacks of opportunities right there, and in the long term they will become a standard part of marketing mix.

But in the short term? I don’t think so. Not for the vast majority of companies who tend to struggle to get marketing initiatives of the ground using known channels and tools.

It’s not because these ideas, tools, strategies etc wouldn’t work, but because of the same reason SME’s struggle with marketing now; a lack of internal skills and resources to develop the marketing strategy, the combination of activities that should be undertaken and the project management to make sure it happens.

What tends to happen is that search marketing, blogging, email marketing, viral becomes the latest “latest silver bullet” solution sold to them with a promise to fix all marketing woes…and so we go around and around.

What is the greatest weakness in small business marketing? I think lack of focus and project management are up there, but I’d like some comments.