Web Marketing Therapy

Marketing Therapy Tip – Ask a Lot of Questions

October 10th, 2008
by Lorrie Thomas

Happy Friday Web Marketers!

I wanted to share a healthy tip to leave you with before you settle off into the weekend…this tip emerged after an insanely busy week of working with tech people, trade show collateral development folks and PR teams. All the people I have partnered with this week are experts in their field, fields that I know very little about (but need to partner with to take care of our clients) The pattern I noticed is that we become experts in our space then we tend to ASSUME (and you know what happens when you do that!) that the people on the other end care as much about our companies as we do – WRONG. Each industry has a distinct language, best practices and rules and if we play in other sandboxes, we need to LEARN the rules and make sure we UNDERSTAND what the best practices are to do our best marketing work. I learned this week that my expert partners often forget to educate newbies like me so here is your tip of the day to help you succeed in small business marketing:

ASK A LOT OF QUESTIONS

My favorite tactic to get my marketing partners to educate me so I can learn the lingo, best practices and best collaborate with them to get optimal client results is to use the phrase “Help me understand…..(then ask the question)…” NEVER ASSUME that you are getting all the critical information you need to do the best job.

The reality is marketing execution people like web designers, webmasters, printers, etc., get tired, bombarded or they assume that you know what is in their brain already (ego thing!) and it is our job to OWN OUR SUCCESS by asking enough questions to get the best results. We have to push for greatness.

Case in point – I am working with a company in the Midwest to design marketing collateral for a client’s upcoming trade show. I send the artwork, they reply that they got it, I ASSUME that we are good to go.

STOP

I almost assumed that what I sent them was great and we were done. I wasn’t owning my marketing success. I called the trade show collateral company and let them know that I followed the design specs but I was NOT an expert in best practices on how to make the best use of this type of investment and I asked them to check my work and give me their expert opinion so I got the BEST results.

If you don’t ask for help, you may not always get it….

So marketing tip – ask questions, use the “help me understand” tactic, never assume you are getting all the info, and tap the experts you have working with you….you may not get the best results otherwise.

Not only will you get better results, you invest in your own intellectual capital so you can do a better job on future work.