Is Your Marketing Pilot Light Lit?
The pilot light on my water heater went out the other day. Since I’m soooooo handy, it was no big deal. In fact, it was a great object lesson in marketing.
A pilot light is a pretty cool thing. The pilot is a small gas flame that ignites the main gas burner. A thermocouple — a tiny electrical apparatus — converts the energy from the pilot light into a small electric current to keep the gas valve open. If the pilot light goes out, the thermocouple detects the failure and closes the gas valve, thus preventing a potentially dangerous gas leak.
Incorporating a thermocouple into your marketing strategy will help you avoid making mistakes. As a blogger, I use a few easy tools to notify me of “hiccups” in my marketing and keep me on track. Here are a few:
- Feedburner (now owned by Google). Gives me data about my subscribers.
- Google Analytics. Gives me data about page views, popular posts, which links visitors click, etc.
- Twitter Search. Lets me see which Tweets and posts get retweeted (forwarded downstream)
- PollDaddy. Lets me gather quantitative feedback to specific questions.
- Comments. Let’s me take an “informal” pulse of my readers.
Obviously, these tools work for me because my “business” (insofar as this blog is a business) is strictly digital. They are my thermocouple — my feedback mechanism. Yours will be unique to you.
A quick caveat: Metrics aren’t foolproof. Data is subject to insufficiency, misconstruction, and misinterpretation. While a rough idea if your marketing is working is important, don’t get too hung up on the numbers. Go off script once in a while, says Todd Defren.
Okay, business owners — your turn: If marketing is the flame that ignites your business growth, what is the thermocouple? What feedback mechanism do you use to alert you when your marketing pilot light has gone out?
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Scott Hepburn is a veteran PR and marketing professional. He blogs here about marketing, PR, advertising, journalism and social media.