A Dead Statistician Has Some Advice For Your Marketing
If you stayed awake in your college businesses classes, the name W. Edwards Deming might ring a bell. He was a genius at improving manufacturing and management processes. Consulting with Japanese and American companies throughout his career, he helped improve the quality of products, limit defects and boost profit margins. A big part of his scientific philosophy involved developing and refining processes. He once said “If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.”
That statement doesn't just ring true for manufacturing widgets. It also applies to Web design and marketing. One of the big objectives we have at Webstratics, and something we have been working on for a long time, is developing better processes for the work we do. With Web design, this means we are looking at each project and asking how the process can be improved. We want to produce great sites that get results. That starts by creating a process that results in great work.
We realized that the process starts long before a Web designer fires up a program. We we start by laying out specific objectives, identifying key audience groups, thinking through desired visitor actions, assessing the creative necessities, identifying key technology requirements and laying out an executable plan. It is quite a bit of work, but the results make it worth it.
Web design is just one example, but really all advertising and marketing activities should have a describable process of how you get from where you are to where you want to be. If you can't figure out the process, then, Deming would say, don't spend money on it.
How about your marketing? Do you have a process? One way to find out is to try writing it down, step by step. If you can't do that, you don't have a process. And if you don't have a process, the man so cool that his middle name is plural says you have a problem.