‘Low Hanging Fruit’ can offer a quick-win for a business but is it wise to ignore the wider picture?
Method Marketing?
Our philosophy is to practice what we preach. We believe taking this approach gives us a hands-on understanding of the issues we address with our clients. We like to think of this as ‘method marketing’ Over the last few months we have been involved with a specialist consultant as part of the Growth Accelerator programme. The programme looks to deliver economic benefits to the UK through helping good, potentially high growth companies to develop in a managed & sustainable way. Very quickly it has become clear that one of the key drivers of growth is sustained, joined-up marketing.
It’s not all about short-term
As an SME, it is all too easy to be focused on the short term. We often find clients talking to us about wanting to “get the quick win” or “pick the low hanging fruit“ (or other similar cliches!). Although identifying and exploiting these should always be a part of a joined-up marketing strategy, all too often they become the only goal! This tends to result in marketing being short term and disjointed.
Think to the future
The Growth Accelerator process encourages business owners to stop looking at performance over the next 6-12 months, and rather think about how to deliver performance over the next 3 years and beyond! In our own case, we are starting to take a longer term view of our marketing. Rather than concentrating on what we need to do to drive the business over the next 3-6 months (which is mainly a ‘done-deal’ anyway!), we are moving to think about what processes we should be putting in place to deliver even more client-value in the longer term, and then how can we communicate this value offering to our market in a sustainable and joined-up way over the coming years.
Be realistic
Inevitably, the short term is still important. As an SME, you shouldn’t lose sight of the short term needs of the business, but surprisingly (or maybe not?), taking a more long-term, joined-up approach to our business development, is benefiting the short term opportunities too! The quick win and low hanging fruit are there to be had/picked, but we are starting to learn, that maybe we don’t need to spend all our marketing effort looking for them!
