I spent a career in advertising prior to becoming a mortgage professional. I am now learning how to develop healthy direct relationships, not just account names and awards on the advertising agency roster. Today's lending landscape is challenging for everyone. Let's turn that on it's head: our success depends entirely on being effective and engaged!
Previously, I delivered strategic plans and implementing a brand evolution, often in difficult competitive markets. A decade later I still find those core lessons illuminating. Classic marketing or what some unkindly refer to as 'old school' is, in fact, the basis of 'new school'. And anyone worth their salt in marketing has learned these lessons and evolved or, like a hapless loan officer relying on paid leads, is dead and gone.
To restate the so-called new school strategy correctly, it is essentially based on advising people how to focus and use your limited resources to establish yourself as the trusted leader in your market in order to succeed. A successful strategy is based on the WHAT AND WHY of becoming successful. How you accomplish a group of tools is tactical. Tactics are the HOW, the 'conduct of engagement'.
Warning: It drives me crazy when people use the word strategy when they are talking about tactics. Tactics are easy to leap into implementing right away because we understand a good tool when we see one. But a tactic is easily misused or even wasted, if not targeted for a specific reason to a specific end user.
Define 'strategy': from wikipedia:
"Strategy, a word of military origin, refers to a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. In military usage strategy is distinct from tactics, which are concerned with the conduct of an engagement, while strategy is concerned with how different engagements are linked. How a battle is fought is a matter of tactics: the terms and conditions that it is fought on and whether it should be fought at all is a matter of strategy, which is part of the four levels of warfare: political goals or grand strategy, strategy, operations, and tactics.
Marketing strategy is a process that can allow an organization to concentrate its limited resources on the greatest opportunities to increase sales and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. A marketing strategy should be centered around the key concept that customer satisfaction is the main goal."(end wiki quote)
Tools are Tactical. Tools are not strategies!!!! Tactics are the responses or means you implement to ACHIEVE your strategy. It's worth remembering that to blithely employing a bunch of tactical responses without a brand strategy 'net' to weave it all together could be compared to a shotgun scattering your ammunition in one great blast compared to using a laser beam to focus on your actual target's forehead. Pardon the graphics, but I think you get the picture. Lasers take a lot less energy too!
If you use Facebook to tell people about your summer vacation, you could be missing the real opportunity to mine that platform! Facebook can help you build a leadership position while you celebrate others in your community (your referral partners hint hint!) so you win by association with things that inspire others.
Develop a Laser Vision: Read Guerrilla Marketingby Jay Conrad Levinson. Levinson defines his approach essentially as: Using your resources that you have, in fact, maximizing those resources; to become the best most trusted professional in your field. This is based on the WHY. You can then link up the the various means you will employ to build your brand strategy = victory = recognition and financial success.
In this context, tactics or your tools define the 'conduct of engagement'. Your tactics need to be linked to the goals or desired outcome of the battle. This is stuff is actually very old school and Lao Tsu might be the oldest strategic dog of all.
Collaborate, Co-Create and Celebrate! Another strategy to consider is the enormous potential of collaboration over competition. We have arrived in a unique time and place in our culture. The shift beneath our feet has allowed us to look around. Consider what we truly value. Smart caring professionals are engaged in our communities because it's the right thing to do. We have a lot of skills and tools to share. In a way, it would be unethical not to share them!
Read The Go-Giver by Burg and Mann. Learn to give without expectation of reward simply because it's the right thing to do. Carl White talks a lot about this in his 'Results in Advance theory'. Look him up! (Warning: Carl thinks old school marketing is old hat but we love him for what he puts out!)
Your generosity will not be lost on your local market. These times have provided new opportunities to value our exchanges with our greater audiences based on mutual respect and win win for all. The new school of cultural change for the common is not about 'killing the competition'. It's about building a better world in which we can all enjoy an abundant life for all. Not just to save our businesses but to help rebuild our communities.
Embrace that! loannetter
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