Making Mediation Your Day Job, Part 7: Setting Your Mediation Marketing Agenda

January 2, 2007 ·

In this last part of Making Mediation Your Day Job, you’ll set your mediation marketing agenda for the next 90 days, much in the same way you’d help your mediation parties set their agenda for negotiation and action.

I once heard marketing professional Adam Urbanski use the phrase “opt and dropped” to describe the haphazard marketing approach taken by many service professionals. It’s both a memorable and apropos term.

Opt and dropped happens when you run a newspaper ad for a few weeks and, when response isn’t what you hoped, you stop. Opt and dropped happens when you build a website, put it up, and generally forget about it. Opt and dropped happens when you start a business blog, write for a few weeks or months, then let the blog die a quiet death when clients aren’t jamming your phone lines.

You need to give your chosen marketing strategies a real chance to work. This means putting serious forethought into them and making sure that each individual piece of your strategy contributes to your goals. It means putting dedicated time into those strategies. And it means running with the strategy for a legitimately effective stretch of time.

This section of the book is intended to help you avoid the Opt and Dropped Syndrome by creating a simple, comprehensive marketing plan that’s grounded by activities you enjoy and a target market to which you’re truly drawn.

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