Social marketing is only part of a healthy marketing mix. If you're still stuck looking at social media as a standalone technology, you'll soon be left behind. The Fusion Marketing Bible, Lon Safko's upcoming book, takes on this challenge, integrating 6,000 years of traditional marketing, the exciting digital marketing tools of the Internet age, and social media into one seamless tool set to help you achieve any goals you set. In anticipation of our upcoming webinar, Fusion Marketing - It's What's Next!, we sat down with Lon for some Q & A.
What exactly is "Fusion Marketing"?
We all have trouble wrapping our brains around all of the marketing needed to be successful in business today. Fusion Marketing fuses traditional, digital, and social media into one simple marketing platform that increases revenue. Fusion represents a revolutionary technique for analyzing every possible traditional marketing tool to find the tools with the greatest ROI for your company. Next, it shows you how to develop and choose extremely effective digital / social media tools. Finally, Fusion Marketing takes you through a process of completely "fusing" all of these tools together into one amazing, effective, and custom marketing plan.
How can businesses benefit from Fusion Marketing?
Fusion Marketing allows us to see the big picture of our marketing efforts and to see connections we never saw before. By leveraging these interconnections, you can see exponential returns on your marketing dollars without spending a cent more.
What is this "patent pending" marketing tool that you invented called the Safko Wheel?
The Safko Wheel is a marketing tool that easily allows you to place up to 40 different forms of marketing around the Wheel and see all possibilities at a glance. By placing all of your marketing tools around the Safko Wheel, you can begin to immediately see connections you never would have seen before. Connecting one tool on the Wheel to another, you can leverage the best practices of each of those tools together.
The Wheel also allows you to effectively develop all of your strategies and goals. By placing a goal or objective in the center of the Wheel and connecting it one-by-one to all of the custom tools around the Wheel, your most effective Tactics will emerge. By combining those Tactics with the Tools that satisfy your Objectives, you will develop killer strategies!
How can a company benefit from your invention, "Fractal Fusion" Marketing?
Fractal Fusion take the concept of Fusion Marketing combined with the Safko Wheel and allows businesses to selectively choose just one marketing tool and drill down into that tool to identify even more opportunities than previously imagined. For example, what if you chose "social networks," just one tool out of more than 40 to choose from, and placed it in the center of the Safko Wheel? This would make you look at the top 20 social networks in the world.
Can you name the top 20 social networks? No? Google it! Then place them around the Safko Wheel. Do you notice how many you don't have a profile on? How many can you "fuse"? Are you using Facebook to drive people to your LinkedIn profile? Can people look at your LinkedIn profile and simply click to see your Facebook timeline?
In your book, you actually redefined "strategy". Can you elaborate?
Everyone thinks they know the definition of "strategy" until you ask them. I studied this term and found there was no effective answer. Strategy isn't a thing; it's the combined outcome of defining several objectives, selecting the proper tools, and connecting those tools to that objective to create effective tactics.
Start with creating several solid objectives, such as "I want to increase my email list" or "I want to drive more traffic to a specific product web page". Place one Objective in the center of the Safko Wheel and ask yourself "How can I use each tool on the Wheel to achieve that objective?" or "How can I use Print Ads to increase my email effectiveness?" or "How can I use my business cards to grow my email list?". Move around the Safko Wheel asking that of every tool. Collect your answers to create a killer custom list of strategies that works perfectly for your company!