Spaghetti Marketing refers to the idea that you throw out a whole lot of marketing, and you see what sticks. So, the symbol, or the example would be that you throw a pot of spaghetti against the wall, and you see what sticks to it. So, the concept of Spaghetti Marketing is actually useful in a couple of situations.
The situations where Spaghetti Marketing is useful is when you are launching a new product or service, and you’re not exactly certain of the best way to actually promote or market it. You will have some information of course because you will have done some market research or you would have thought through whom it is you are targeting and how you might reach them.
But, the fact is that nobody can ever predict what marketing will actually catch fire and what marketing will actually fizzle. If you look at examples like the subservient chicken at SubservientChicken.com, which was Burger King’s foray into new media marketing; at this site, what you’ll see is that you can type in commands, and the chicken will do whatever you ask it to do. It’s basically a person in a chicken suit who will take whatever actions you want them to take.
This was a huge marketing gain for Burger King, but it actually also could have not gone so well because what if people didn’t like the chicken? In some ways, they had to put it out there and see what worked. In a way, this was a form of Spaghetti Marketing.
As a professional services provider, you obviously want to get the most benefit for your efforts as often as you can because your time and your energy are limited. If you are solely responsible for marketing your practice, attending to your clients and providing them services, making sure all the payments come in, doing your own accounting; all of the tasks that go with running a small service business – what you want to be very, very sure of is that you get a lot of return on your marketing investment.
That works out really, really well except in those cases where your existing marketing isn’t working. So, in those times (and they happen to all of us) when your marketing is less effective or it’s not working like you planned, than you need to adopt the idea of Spaghetti Marketing.
So, Spaghetti Marketing means that you try something different than what you’ve been doing, and you do it even if it feels uncomfortable or especially if it feels uncomfortable.
So, you go ahead and you put out a ton of stuff. You may have to get up a little bit earlier in the morning or go to bed a little bit later in order to launch these marketing initiatives. While that’s not a good long-term strategy, in the short term it can be very beneficial; especially if your daily life is already overly scheduled or highly crammed with responsibilities.
The idea is that you look at other ways to market, and you give yourself a chance to put out into the world a lot of different methods or avenues to share your work or your product. Than, you see what kind of results you get. When you get results (and you will, one way or the other), you start to improve on what’s working, and you let go of what doesn’t.
So, if you want to bring more business into your business; than what you have to do is you have to be able to keep doing what works, and be open to finding new things. Sometimes the idea is that you would be inefficient in doing that, but it’s better always to put something out there today rather than wait to perfect it and never actually expose it to the marketplace.
