Question
How do you deal with marketing epiphanies that require you to act fast?
Answer
While I applaud your inspiration, thinking of marketing this way is very dangerous. Marketing is not one clever time-sensitive promotional idea after another. This is a terrible way to think about marketing. It leads to the "random acts of marketing" pathology. Sound and fury adding up to nothing eventually.
The way to get to agility around sudden opportunities in PR/marketing is to think of the bread-and-butter of marketing as a long, unsexy years-ahead activity where you win by being persistent. This is what gives you the strong base from which to react to opportunities. To use a sports metaphor, you're like a very creative and talented soccer tactician who has spotted a great play developing downfield, 100 yards away, but (possibly) don't actually have the personal stamina, muscle power or strategic command over the field to execute the play.
How do you fix this? I can't offer band-aids for your current situation without knowing a lot more about the situational details, but I can offer you some general thoughts on how to avoid finding yourself in this situation again, with a great opportunity, but no means with which to pursue it.
Think of your marketing as an ongoing brand-maintenance and steering story driven by a few carefully chosen persistent messaging channels where you keep a steady drumbeat that relentlessly reinforces your long-term strategic positioning in the marketplace. This signal shouldn't vary or waver too much except when the business model shifts. It's like the drum background plus bass line. Until this is thumping around solidly, you don't have the foundation on which to do virtuoso foreground solo riffs with the lead guitar or vocals.
In practice this means, once you've done the startup phase of establishing a brand (a topic in itself), on average about 60-70% of your energy should go towards maintaining the base. This means 60-70% of your resources (creative and analytic staff, business strategy staff/liaisons, PR, media budget, relationship owners, channel owners...) should be devoted, on average to keeping the base healthy. The rest goes towards agile pursuit of opportunities as they arise on all time scales, from one hour to one year.
The 60-70% is not constant, but a long-term moving average. You can spike to 90% on temporary/transient opportunities if need be. But this takes foresight and planning. So if your best copywriter is doing a weekly retention newsletter, have her always maintain a queue of 3-4 newsletters out into the future, so that if you need to grab her for opportunistic pursuit of something, you won't disrupt the base. Interrupting the weekly newsletter to service a temporary opportunity might seem fine if you do it occasionally, but if every 3rd newsletter is missing because you were doing crazy stuff, the base atrophies and engagement drops.
And you default to random acts of marketing that add up to nothing. No long-term strategy, no reinforced and defensible market positioning, no slow building up of muscles for greater future agility.
So I applaud your energy and clear excitement/creative energy around whatever shiny new idea has caught your attention. Now harness it to some duller basic discipline around your marketing base and you'll be all set to do some agile dancing, great solo riffs etc.
Remember, the job of marketing, per Drucker, is to make sales superfluous. They call you, so you don't have to call them. You don't do this with one clever idea after the other. You do this by slowly building an intense magnetic field around your brand, an ineffable force that simply makes everything 10x easier for your business.
If you like a more esoteric framing, the job of marketing is to get "inside the tempo" of the market (OODA loop thinking). For this, you need both the strong base and the opportunistic agility. Just a strong base will make marketing just as expensive way of selling as sales, there will be no leverage. But just opportunistic agility will turn you into an armchair tactician because you are not building up the potential energy to actually execute on most things (eg. soccer plays that require 4 people to sprint 100 m in 13 seconds), and for the things that actually work, no disciplined way to harness the attention to long-term strategy. That will be one flash-flood of attention after another leading nowhere.
The way to get to agility around sudden opportunities in PR/marketing is to think of the bread-and-butter of marketing as a long, unsexy years-ahead activity where you win by being persistent. This is what gives you the strong base from which to react to opportunities. To use a sports metaphor, you're like a very creative and talented soccer tactician who has spotted a great play developing downfield, 100 yards away, but (possibly) don't actually have the personal stamina, muscle power or strategic command over the field to execute the play.
How do you fix this? I can't offer band-aids for your current situation without knowing a lot more about the situational details, but I can offer you some general thoughts on how to avoid finding yourself in this situation again, with a great opportunity, but no means with which to pursue it.
Think of your marketing as an ongoing brand-maintenance and steering story driven by a few carefully chosen persistent messaging channels where you keep a steady drumbeat that relentlessly reinforces your long-term strategic positioning in the marketplace. This signal shouldn't vary or waver too much except when the business model shifts. It's like the drum background plus bass line. Until this is thumping around solidly, you don't have the foundation on which to do virtuoso foreground solo riffs with the lead guitar or vocals.
In practice this means, once you've done the startup phase of establishing a brand (a topic in itself), on average about 60-70% of your energy should go towards maintaining the base. This means 60-70% of your resources (creative and analytic staff, business strategy staff/liaisons, PR, media budget, relationship owners, channel owners...) should be devoted, on average to keeping the base healthy. The rest goes towards agile pursuit of opportunities as they arise on all time scales, from one hour to one year.
The 60-70% is not constant, but a long-term moving average. You can spike to 90% on temporary/transient opportunities if need be. But this takes foresight and planning. So if your best copywriter is doing a weekly retention newsletter, have her always maintain a queue of 3-4 newsletters out into the future, so that if you need to grab her for opportunistic pursuit of something, you won't disrupt the base. Interrupting the weekly newsletter to service a temporary opportunity might seem fine if you do it occasionally, but if every 3rd newsletter is missing because you were doing crazy stuff, the base atrophies and engagement drops.
And you default to random acts of marketing that add up to nothing. No long-term strategy, no reinforced and defensible market positioning, no slow building up of muscles for greater future agility.
So I applaud your energy and clear excitement/creative energy around whatever shiny new idea has caught your attention. Now harness it to some duller basic discipline around your marketing base and you'll be all set to do some agile dancing, great solo riffs etc.
Remember, the job of marketing, per Drucker, is to make sales superfluous. They call you, so you don't have to call them. You don't do this with one clever idea after the other. You do this by slowly building an intense magnetic field around your brand, an ineffable force that simply makes everything 10x easier for your business.
If you like a more esoteric framing, the job of marketing is to get "inside the tempo" of the market (OODA loop thinking). For this, you need both the strong base and the opportunistic agility. Just a strong base will make marketing just as expensive way of selling as sales, there will be no leverage. But just opportunistic agility will turn you into an armchair tactician because you are not building up the potential energy to actually execute on most things (eg. soccer plays that require 4 people to sprint 100 m in 13 seconds), and for the things that actually work, no disciplined way to harness the attention to long-term strategy. That will be one flash-flood of attention after another leading nowhere.