Terrie S. Wheeler: The Four Pillars of Marketing is a term I coined many years ago to make marketing seem more manageable for professionals. It can be very amorphous and people don’t know where to start. So in our process, we always start with a strategic assessment. We develop a marketing plan and then the Four Pillars of Marketing come into play. They’re the activities that we help our clients pursue under these areas. I’ll tell you what they are right now:
The First Pillar of Marketing is all about retaining and growing relationships with your existing clients, contacts, referral sources. It’s leveraging the best of what you have in your marketing efforts. It’s not reinventing the wheel.
The Second Pillar of Marketing is about new business development. It’s about establishing relationships with people who don’t know you yet but should. So it’s what you’re doing on your sales pipeline, networking, building referral source relationships.
The Third Pillar of Marketing is about increasing your name recognition and awareness in the marketplace. Because if people don’t know who you are, it’s going to be a lot harder to market your services. Building name recognition involves things like limited but possible advertising, as well as social media, blogging. It’s getting your name out there, presenting. So the Third Pillar of Marketing is very important because you need to have people know who you are.
The Fourth Pillar of Marketing is about targeted and effective communications. If you’re not communicating with individuals who you want to work with, how are they going to know who you are? How are you going to stay top-of-mind with them? So the Fourth Pillar of Marketing includes everything from your website to your electronic communications.
What I always tell my clients is that you want to make sure that your marketing strategies are not heavily weighted in one versus another pillar. They should be equally disbursed throughout all four pillars of marketing. My belief is that if you use The Four Pillars of Marketing, you are going to generate results because you will have a very balanced marketing strategy.
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