Some Times It’s Just Not That Glamorous

I wish that marketing was always about creating cool ads, exciting designs, out of the box promotions or other things that you want to call home and brag to mom about. It’s just not the case and it’s important to have an appreciation of that early on in your career.

Instead, a lot of time is spent finding the best list to send a direct mail package to, reviewing reams market research studies and spending inordinate time in a database figuring out every bit of information you can about your members and prospects in hopes of finding one actionable nugget.

This week we’re entering into one of those periods that isn’t so glamorous and I think that’s a good thing for everyone. Our department is making individual calls to a long list of prospects to generate participation in a survey and to gather additional demographic information for our database.

I don’t relish for a minute asking folks to make a large number of calls, especially when they’re cold (in this case I would argue they’re at least luke-warm). But it needs to be done so we’re going to do it.

In the process, my hope is that everyone in the department is reminded that many times marketing is rooted in the basics and there is always something to learn when you’re talking directly to your customers and prospects. That’s an important reminder for all of us, so it won’t be just the marketing assistants making the calls.

I’m looking forward to upcoming posts…I suspect we’ll hear about some of the mundane aspects of having to call…but at the same time, I’m confident that we’ll hear about folks learning something in the process.