A Marketing Team

Most of us will go through a season of having to do all our own marketing, but eventually it is helpful to graduate to the point of having a marketing team.

My wife and I began with the build-a-better-mousetrap school of thought and expected the world to beat a path to our door: I with my book, workbook and CDs about prophetic song; she with her four-color graphic intensive books for children. We’ve both had to learn a lot the hard way.

Slowly but surely, we’ve begun getting our marketing materials together. Sometimes I or we are invited to participate in a conference; for that, we keep photos and bios on file. Because JoAnn and I both are multi-talented, we have prepared bios that reflect the variety of things we do. We have built websites. I maintain four blogs. I have familiarized myself with the basics of search engine optimization and have shaped my website accordingly. If you run a search on prophetic song, my materials are usually among the first listed; search for prophetic worship and I’m a lot further down the list. Only rarely have our websites led to sales of our products or services, but they do seem to add to our overall credibility.

I could go on to tell about the colorful business cards JoAnn has designed for both of us, the flyers and email letters we have had to produce for special events, the copies of our work we have given away for promotional purposes, and so on. We haven’t gotten serious with FaceBook or MySpace and have never done anything with press releases, direct mailing, or promotional giveaways.

It’s a lot of work to market our work, and we haven’t had time to do all we could. So a few months ago when we met a man who has a lot of experience in marketing and the arts, we kept our ears open and wanted to learn all we could. I’m creative, but Terry’s IPM Quotient – Ideas-Per-Minute – far exceeds mine.

As our friendship grew, we all began to sense that God wanted us to work together on a few projects. So I’m not sure what to call Terry’s position – for starters we’re calling him our Manager – but he is putting together a team for a special project for JoAnn. He has just posted his new website at cre8ives.net.

For decades, JoAnn has worked on the Alphabuddies, a series of 350 graphics, most of which are a whimsical alphabet made of people, animals, flowers, trees, and more. Terry saw the potential to use these graphics in a literacy campaign aimed at helping disadvantaged children learn to read.

Terry has cultivated a lot of connections over the years, and he has linked us with educators so JoAnn can revise a story she wrote years ago and produce an alphabet book. We needed a writer to make the story sparkle; I ended up doing the writing, which meant putting the whole book into rhythm and rhyme.

JoAnn has spent several weeks putting in long days on her graphics, Terry has linked us to designers who will critique her work. This has led to revisions, but the teamwork is bringing out the best in JoAnn and the pages look better and better.

Now we are in the phase of preparing some of the marketing materials: bios, photos, and more.

I’m going to write other articles about this process in coming weeks, but for this article want to make one simple point: until we built a better mousetrap and waited in vain for the world to beat a path to our door, we didn’t realize we needed to market our work. And until we tried to do all the marketing we could on our own, we didn’t realize that we need a team.

So God’s timing has been right. We’re grateful to have met Terry, and are doing all we can to rise to the occasion as God has given us this opportunity.

Stan Smith :: © 2009, GospelSmith :: www.GospelSmith.com