Below are 8 crucial questions that were posted today by one of my favorite marketing authors Seth Godin. I felt this would be a productive exercise this morning to go through and post our answers to these questions here on our blog and invite others to share their thoughts about this. We are curious to hear how these questions apply to your own businesses and how we might understand you better as a current or potential new clients for our agency.
1. Who are you trying to please?
FirstTracks Marketing Group is always striving to please their clients at all times by offering them the most innovative, productive, and successful marketing program implementations we can. From complete Joomla CMS website implementations to Social Media Marketing to Direct Mail Marketing we are always looking for the best mix of marketing communications to help you connect with your target audiences more efficiently and effectively. We listen and then listen some more so we can help clients articulate their aspirations.
2. What are you promising?
FirstTracks Marketing Group promises (at the risk of being completely cliche here) to always go above and beyond for our clients. This doesn’t just mean working long hours this means we promise to continue to learn, grow, and evolve our craft to ensure that your marketing programs always remain on the cutting edge of effectiveness with your target audiences regardless of your delivery systems.
3. How much money are you trying to make?
FirstTracks Marketing Group is always trying to make enough money to sustain and grow it’s business. We have great aspirations of always being able to serve our clients better and to continue to do that we have a controlled company growth strategy in place to help us continue to expand our resources and skill sets. We know that if we do good work that is valued by our clients appropriate revenues will follow.
4. How much freedom are you willing to trade for opportunity?
This is kind of a strange question, but I think in our case at FirstTracks Marketing Group, one of the reasons we do what we do is that our line of work provides us with lots of freedom and flexibility in our jobs. Remaining fluid in our schedules day to day is an important part of who we are and how we are able to provide such great service for all of our clients whenever they need it. Malcom Gladwell in his book Outliers identifies three key ingredients creating a successful workplace; autonomy, creativity and a clear relationship between work and reward. Our company embraces these and builds upon them every day.
5. What are you trying to change?
FirstTracks Marketing Group is trying to change the way healthcare organizations and non-profits market their businesses on and off line. We see so much missed opportunity in the healthcare and non-profit sectors that we feel this is an industry and market that could really benefit from better integrated marketing programs that allow them to connect with their communities on a more regular basis. Making yourself available and connecting with your community is usually only the first step, taking complete control over your message and doing something that is remarkable (worth talking about, not just unique) on a regular basis is where you truly start to see exceptional gains for all your communication mediums.
6. What do you want people to say about you?
FirstTracks Marketing Group would like their clients to speak very highly of their dedication to making all their marketing programs a success no matter what it takes. We take our client relationships very seriously and treat all our clients as business partners, we just hope that we are evoking that dedication accurately on a day to day basis with all our clients and that they will be compelled to share that information if/when people ask who does their marketing and design. We pride ourselves on maintaining an acute sense of empathy with our clients. Only by putting ourselves in their shoes can we truly develop programs that meet their needs.
7. Which people?
Our primary industry focus as an agency is healthcare institutions and non-profits. We want all the people we interact with as our clients to enjoy working with FirstTracks Marketing Group and rely on us to continually provide them with the marketing and design strategies and materials they need to continue to be successful.
8. Do we care about you?
We sincerely hope that all of our clients care as much about us as we care about them. We continually strive to maintain an open line of communication and forum for sharing ideas. We never claim to have all the answers and honestly without our clients wouldn’t be much of an agency! 2009 was a crazy and exciting year for many of us and in 2010 we look forward to all the new opportunities with our current clients while adding a few new faces to that group as well.
So, what are your business plans for 2010?
We hope you enjoyed reading and learning a little bit more about what makes FirstTracks Marketing Group tick, we hope that you too will take some time and ask yourselves these questions about your business as you look to 2010. If you are thinking that you may need a new marketing strategy and some new marketing programs such as a new website, social media marketing, or even some re-branding please contact us today. We would welcome a chance to sit down with you and discuss how we may partner together to help you reach those goals. Please feel free to use the comment forms below to share some of your goals and ideas for 2010, we would enjoy hearing them and getting an opportunity to respond to each of them!
