Itouched upon the piecemeal way some businesses view marketing a few weeks ago with this post here, but as 2013 draws to a close and businesses start thinking about how they market themselves for the year ahead, it’s an area worth revisiting.

You see, I get a lot of inquiries from businesses looking to “drive traffic” to their websites or perhaps design them a better website than they currently possess.

Or maybe they need a sales letter written for a direct mail campaign they are looking to run.

All of which will help their businesses somewhat, but if it’s not carried out as part of an overall strategy, it’ll more than likely prove inadequate.

If a business has strong market positioning, possesses a “premium pricing” mindset, has sharpened their “unique selling point” so it cuts through the clutter of their competitors like a hot knife through butter and has adopted a solid direct response marketing frame, then their strategy would appear to be in good shape.

In a scenario like that, if they needed someone to drive some visitors to their website, then I would be able to slot right in.

But in all likelihood for most businesses, there’s going to be some work to do before any traffic is sent anywhere.

Driving traffic to a website NOT set up to convert is about as effective as attempting to fill a bath recently blasted by an errant flying meteor.

Likewise even the best copywriter in the world will have difficulty writing a decent sales letter if there is nothing unique about the business, and offers no compelling reason for anyone other than price shoppers to do business with them.

Great marketing is the sum of a myriad different parts which coalesce together to form a cohesive unit which, when set up correctly, churns out leads practically on autopilot.

It is NOT a high converting website left all forlorn out by itself on the information superhighway, slowly going mad having full blown conversations with itself because it hasn’t seen a visitor in weeks.

Nor does it mean burning through your Adwords budget sending legions of visitors to a website where their true needs and wants aren’t realised.

So if you are looking for me to send you traffic to your website it’s possible I can help you.

Likewise if you are looking for a high converting websites I can certainly help with that also. But unless your strategy is on point, a high converting website by itself will produce little more than flailing frustration I’m afraid.

So my New Year tip is thus: you gotta adopt a holistic approach to your marketing. Resign thinking of one off events like “traffic generation” and “website creation” to the dim and distant dustbin of the past, instead make them cogs in your well-oiled lead generating and profit-producing machine.

Remember, marketing is a process, not an event.

Stay Hungry,

Keith “Holistic” Commins

P.S. Because of the fact that there are so few businesses who understand how a website needs to be part of an overall strategy, I turn away more clients than I actually work with. The fees I charge coupled with a non-existent marketing strategy will NOT result in an appreciable ROI for them.

Now for those strategically minded businesses, it’s a different story entirely…