I took part in an online group discussion yesterday on LinkedIn that started from a business owner posing the question:

“Can anyone suggest the best areas to spend marketing budgets in difficult times such as these?”

The floodgates immediately opened, and asking that question resulted in quick machine gun responses from numerous marketing types all mapping out in a few sentences how this man should spend his marketing budget. The funny thing about the responses is that with the exception of mine and about five other people, they all had two things in common:

My solution is your solution

The first thing was, not surprisingly, they all said the best use of this man’s marketing budget was to use their services, which included: SEO, taking clients out to fancy restaurants for lunch for some one on one, writing a white paper, reading someone else’s white paper, adding a blog to his site, engaging in social media marketing, purchasing lists of sales leads, producing videos of customer testimonials, and on and on.

Who are you and what do you want?

The second thing that they had in common was that none of these people offering up their services to this man had anywhere near enough information to even begin to guess what would work for this company. There was no indication of what kind of business he had, who his customers were, what his budget was, or what his marketing goals were. In other words, there was no information to build a marketing PLAN.

All of the suggestions that people made to this man could potentially be valid and useful, but how could anyone possibly know that they had THE solution for him? Without more information it really was an impossible question that could not and should not have been answered in that forum. This man believed that he could pose the question and get a marketing plan for himself for free, but all he got instead was a bunch of sales pitches from people playing out their own marketing strategy of pitching their services in LinkedIn discussion groups.

Get to know yourself

Businesses need to do some of their own homework first before they can reach out and expect to get a valid marketing strategy in place. Seeking assistance with marketing is absolutely a fine thing to do, but first you have to know at least the basics of who you are, what you are trying to achieve, who your customers are and what your budget is. Then, go to a creative marketing strategist that can build a working marketing plan with you to reach your goals. In business (and in life for that matter) the answers are usually not that easy to attain.