Marketing Plans Are Like My Son’s Blanket Tent

Writing that headline, I can already feel the confusion and skepticism, good, it got you here.

Now let me explain. 

Let’s go back in time to yesterday. My family and I woke up to an icy snowy mess outside. 

Schools are closed, so my wife the teacher is home for the day. Daycares are closed, so my son is joining us as well and we’re having a family day. 

But… 

My wife has to do a live online lesson for her students for about an hour today, and it’s not during our son’s nap time. 

Uhhh ohh. 

That means she needs silence and peace around the house, with our three-year-old awake… For an entire hour. 

She would have been better off asking me to cook a meal Gordon Ramsey would approve of.

So, I had to figure out what to do. 

Go outside? It’s 23 degrees and windy, no thank you. 

Play in his room? It’s too close to where my wife will be, so she’ll hear us. 

So, when the time to do the impossible comes, keeping him entertained in one room, quietly, for an hour, I take him to our bedroom because it’s at the back of the house and she won’t hear us. 

We get back there, shut the door, climb on the bed, and no toys..  No puzzles, no books, nothing. 

I’m really good at this dad thing. 

I know she’s already started teaching cause I peek out the door and hear her talking, so I decided to not try and crawl behind her to avoid being on camera to get to all the toys. Time to improvise. 

I look around our bedroom, from the dresser to the bathroom, over to the nightstand, then look at the bed, and the loveseat covered in pillows and throw blankets, and I grin. I’ve got it. 

Hey buddy, I said 

Want to build a tent?

His eyes light up and he smiles. At that moment I know thar this is going to be 10 times more fun for him than any buzz lightyear or hot wheel toyl could have ever been. So we start the building. 

Well, I do anyway. 

But I see a problem, there aren’t any chairs in here, which all the tent and fort building experts know, are the pillar of any good fort. 

But I’ve already told him we’re building one. He’d be devastated. 

So, I do what any dad would do, I improvise. 

I grab the mirror standing over in the corner which is about 6 ft tall and put it in the center of the room. Then I take the only decent-sized blanket in our room, the comforter, and dangle it over the mirror. 

I take the edges of the blanket and reach them over to whatever they can reach and put each edge under a pillow to hold them up, but the tent isn’t near big enough. 

I then realize there are 4 throw blankets in the room… Yes, four. 

But throw blankets are short, and in order to work they have to carefully dangle off the comforter to reach the next thing for the blankets to hang off of. 

I barely made it work, and it was very janky looking, like the dollar tree version of what a blanket tent should look like. We had to be very careful not to bump the roof of it while we were under there, but we had our blanket tent, and we had a blast. 

How does this help my marketing?

Any good marketing plan has a base. Just like our comforter in our blanket tent, it holds your marketing together. 

Every business is different and has different needs. Some will have a base of email marketing, some will have content marketing like blogs and social media. But whatever your main marketing area is, focus on it, you have to have a good base. 

You can not be successful trying to market your business in too many areas at once without a good base, because like me and my sons tent, if the base were to fall, the throw blankets will go with it. 

You have to make sure your base market is secure before you add the extra layers or it will all fall eventually. 

So, you have your base, you know its doing well and now your stuck. 

This is where you add the “throw blankets” aka the new marketing avenues. 

So, say your base is email marketing and it’s doing well. 

Now it’s time to add blog posts, social media, sales pages, google ads, etc. 

Because with a base you can support the growth and have somewhere to point consumers to. 

You will only have a successful marketing plan if you aren’t all over the place and have a direct path for people to take. 

The secondary layers of your marketing are relying on your base layer to be able to succeed. So before you do anything, figure out what your business model will be best for and choose a base, and stick to it. 

Your marketing will thrive this way and will only result in smiles from your company like the smile my son had seeing his first tent fort. 

It is always better to do well in one area of your marketing than terrible in several areas. 

Hope this information helps somehow.