Dr. Emily R. Coleman

Smaller companies have, basically, the same marketing needs as larger ones: They need to build identity, brand recognition, customer engagement, and – most important, of course – sales and revenue. And most entrepreneurs and smaller company executives understand these needs down to their toes, even if they don’t use the right jargon.

A product is far larger than these so-called “life cycle” models would suggest. A product is a lynch-pin in a company’s overall marketing strategy. It is a building block in the company’s identity. It is a way to build the company’s reputation. Each product is a critical part of what that company is.

Every field develops its own arcane language. Every once in a while, it becomes useful to take this jargon out of the rarefied air of the “professionals” and bring it back down to earth.

Dr. Emily R. Coleman explores the seven deadly sins that might be stifling your marketing efforts.

While we spend our time trying to create an effective social media presence, while we hire SEO firms and “social media marketing managers,” we cheerfully ignore a tremendous social media marketing asset: employees. But this asset needs to be cultivated and informed about marketing.

We don’t think about it much, but most people don’t care about how something works as long as it does what they want and works when it is supposed to. Very few people actually understand the internal combustion engine, but we drive daily. The modern world lives on its cell phones, but how many people do you know who can tell you how wireless telephony works?

Social media networks and communities of like interest are both broader (geography no longer matters at all) and more fluid than they have ever been. We need to ask some more basic questions, I think, before we can determine how to most effectively market in this brave new world and before we can realistically start to determine its ROI.

So you’re connecting like a madman on LinkedIn. Your Facebook likes are growing by leaps and bounds. It’s hard to keep up with the number of people following you on Twitter. You’ve got Pinterest and Google+ aced. You’re a social media pro. So what?

We are all busy acquiring knowledge – in social media marketing, in mobile marketing, in customer relations management (CRM), in customer engagement, in “content” marketing, and on and on. As soon as there is a new buzz word or piece of jargon created (by whomever), marketers feel compelled to elevate it to the level of a discipline.