Why starting a communications campaign is like self-inducing labor

Well baby time is almost upon me and when I’m not staying fully engulfed in client work to keep my mind occupied, I’m finding ways to self-induce labor. I’m due, technically tomorrow, to have my first baby. And if you’ve ever met a woman who’s a full 40 weeks pregnant, you know the sense of readiness they feel about making this happen already. Sort of like an entrepreneur who’s been preparing to launch a new venture for the last year give or take. By this point in the game we’re irritable, uncomfortable, fed up waiting and just want to see the fruits of our labor…er…so to speak.

So as I’m working all of the techniques involved to get things moving — walking, eating spicy food, sitting on an exercise ball, negotiating an exit strategy with the baby — it got me thinking that trying to self-induce labor is a lot like getting a communications strategy underway. This occurred to me on my third walk of the day. Much like marketing, one strategy just won’t do the trick. You need to identify several strategies and put them all into motion, consistently and repeatedly, to get results.

So today I started having contractions. Yay! The result I was looking for. Was it the walk this morning or a culmination of the 10 walks I took since Saturday? Or perhaps the Indian food last night or maybe the Mexican food on Monday. It could have been the exercise ball that did it. It’s really hard to say which labor-inducing strategy did it. But that’s the point, it probably wasn’t any one thing, but rather each activity leveraging and building upon the one before.

The same is true with a communications campaign. The media relations is pretty good on its own, but works really well when combined with social media, some webinars, a case study or two, and some good old fashioned networking.

It tends to drive some people crazy to not be able to directly measure each and every marketing strategy back to the results. I know, I get it. It’s frustrating for us too. So here’s what we do: we take a step back and look at the big picture. Were customer acquisitions up consistently quarter over quarter? Was website traffic up? Are the quality of inbound leads stronger and conversations increasing? If the end goals are being achieved, then chances are your combined communications strategy is working.

We had a client this week ask us what else they should be doing with their marketing. They must be missing something as subscriptions for their product are up and down, up and down, day by day — no consistency. Their marketing consists of media relations, social media, a lot of networking, tradeshows, pay-per-click, print advertising (really), direct mail and search. The CEO was frustrated. She can trace jumps in customers directly to most of these but was so focused on the ups and downs of new subscribers every day she was missing the big picture. I had her take a look at a few metrics over the last three months: overall web traffic, number of inbound leads, and number of subscribers. After charting it out, she saw the all three metrics were up cumulatively month over month. THAT’s how she knows it’s all working.

Here’s the thing: with marketing, as with labor, there is seldomly one silver bullet. It takes time, consistency, and several well-thought out strategies that work together and leverage each other. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go for a walk.

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