CONTRIBUTORS

Dan Austin

Growing up in the Tampa Bay area, Dan was drawn to its thriving artistic culture, creative businesses, fashion and an appreciation for the arts. His style of photography tends to lean more on the fashion / editorial side. He has been shooting portraits since 2001. His style for sure has evolved, but his focus remains the same; he strives to capture people in their essence, a candid moment, or in a light that brings out the best in someone.

As a local Florida business owner, he has had great opportunities to collaborate on dynamic editorial projects and advertising campaigns, and to photograph artists and clients—local and abroad.

danaustinphotography.com | @danaustinphoto

Paul Bostrom

Paul is a commercial and editorial photographer based in Lakeland. His happy place is in the studio, snacks on deck, doing meticulous stuff nobody wants to do. If you're still reading this, send him a picture of your dog on Instagram—because that would be hilarious and make his day.

paulbostrom.com | @paulbostrom

Diego De Jesus

Diego is a senior English major at Florida Southern College and currently a staff writer at The Lakelander. Originally from New York City, he came down to Lakeland for his education and has made his home here ever since. He plans on living in Lakeland after graduation to pursue a career in journalism while producing creative prose pieces on the side. The friends and connections that he’s made in Lakeland have truly changed his life for the better, and he is forever grateful for the community accepting him.

good marketing was as simple as telling people what to do then there wouldn’t be ads on your TV screen that you have no clue what they are promoting until the final logo screen.

If Amazon’s stronghold on consumers was truly impenetrable they wouldn’t spend an estimated $33 billion per year on marketing.

If all logos were created equal, then why are some marks iconic and others forgettable?

Just like hiring, finance, organizational structure and employee development, marketing is something that requires planning, investment and strategy.

But for some reason, it’s often an afterthought instead of a line item.

Here are seven reasons that marketing is an integral part of a business’ long-term sustainability and success, and why it can be perilous to neglect it.

YOU DON’T KNOW WHEN SOMEONE MIGHT NEED YOU

Marketing is part science, part bravado and a whole lot of trying new things to determine what works. It is wise to have a marketing agency help you strategize campaigns and produce regularly scheduled content so you can get in front of customers frequently enough that you will come to mind when they have a need. Data proves that it often takes at least 5 to 7 brand impressions for someone to remember your brand.

Marketing is like cultivating an ever-present cold call to a potential customer at just the right time, and this happens when your brand is memorable and meaningful.

IT’S MONEY WELL SPENT

An in-depth survey of chief marketing officers in 2022 showed businesses on average spent 8.7% of company revenue on marketing, so less than 1 in $10 goes into studying, locating and communicating with new and existing customers.

Alternatively, 2022 data by Hubspot indicates that email marketing (as an example) yields a whopping return of $38 for every $1 spent. It might be a hard number to believe, but usually email marketing is an affordable way to get an ad or sponsored content in front of hundreds or thousands of individuals, in a place they visit almost every day (or every few hours)—their email inbox. There are more than 4 billion people with email addresses around the globe, and the right marketing and advertising streams can help you tap into the ones most beneficial for your brand.

Marketing Makes You Smarter

KPI and ROI are all the buzz of companies large and small. KPI is the acronym for key performance indicators and ROI stands for return on investment. You should always know what goals you are targeting, how you are strategizing to reach them and how much money you are investing in it. Where marketing professionals like our team at Lakelander Media pay dividends is by helping you build strategies that have multiple paths toward multiple target audiences and also have checkpoints that allow you to easily change direction based on data and outcomes.

A simple example is using A-B testing. A-B testing allows you to produce different messages for the same campaign and see how they perform against each other. That data about your audience then informs decisions for that campaign and future content.

Good Graces Alone Are Not Enough

Just because you are nice or have a solid product, doesn’t mean you will be profitable. Word-of-mouth marketing is a wonderful revenue source, but it is also wildly inconsistent and it’s difficult to determine if the message is really getting to your target audience(s.)

Lakelander Media Creative Director Jon Sierra owned his own design and branding company—Sierra Creative—for six years. He said one of his biggest regrets, and potentially the reason he went a different direction in his career, is that he didn’t spend enough time and resources on marketing. He said it’s easy to get so lost in the everyday details of owning and running a business that you don’t think there’s time to also focus on how you are getting your own messages out.

Sierra believes if he had put the money and intentionality into marketing his services then he could have created more dependable revenue streams that would not have had such volatile peaks and valleys.

“I would not start another business or initiative if I did not have a marketing plan established,” he said.

THE SEEDS YOU PLANT TODAY GROW TOMORROW’S CROP

Did you know it can sometimes take as long as seven years for a sweet cherry tree to begin flowering and producing fruit?

In today’s market you can either buy the seeds for little cost and put a lot of hard work into harvesting them or you can spend a lot more money to transplant a mature tree that is ready to produce fruit.

For most startups and small businesses, it’s not realistic to purchase an entire farm worth of “cherry trees” up front, but it’s worth investing in seeds and mature trees in the marketing sense.

According to a 2018 Forbes article, simply being consistent when you present your brand can increase a business’s revenue at least 23%.

Don’t become so consumed or enamored with growth in your business that you don’t invest in the next stage of potential growth.

Not Everyone Makes A Good Doctor

If you haven’t done an analysis of your target audiences or considered the look-alike consumers (people who purchase from companies in the same industry or sector as you) then you might not even know the common cures for what ails your business or could make it healthiest in the long term.

Marketing requires developing and implementing strategies that you play a role in with your day-to-day expertise but also involve insights from trained professionals suited to help you diagnose challenges and create solutions.

It Inserts People Into Your Story

Working with a team like ours at Lakelander Media you will learn from experts how to elevate the product, service or business you have poured yourself into by making the brand personal and relatable to consumers. People don’t like to be “sold” to, but they do like to envision themselves enjoying life more, looking good and feeling better. If you have a clothing business, your goal shouldn’t be to convince people that you sell the best clothes, it should be to compel people to want to experience what it feels like and what it represents to choose your apparel as part of their wardrobe. Marketing shows people what’s possible by telling intriguing stories.

the Barney Barnett School of Business & Free Enterprise at Florida Southern College, our 30 full time faculty and approximately 900 students enjoy analyzing the economy and formulating business and professional strategies to help people thrive in all economic conditions. This is a quick snapshot of the current economy and a few suggestions for thriving.

SHOULD WE BE WORRIED? IS THIS A RECESSION OR NOT?

Economic projections are typically based on a variety of factors such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), employment, housing starts, retail sales, stock market performance and more. These projections are usually made by government agencies, international organizations, and private-sector firms. It is important to note that economic projections are subject to change and can be affected by a variety of unpredictable factors such as natural disasters, pandemics, political events, etc. Keep an eye on the official data and projections from reputable organizations such as the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for the most up-to-date information on the global and national economic outlook.

It’s important to note that some of these indicators, particularly GDP, may not be immediately visible and may take some time to be confirmed. Also, a recession is a broad term and can manifest differently across different sectors and regions. In Central Florida, we appear to most likely be in an economic slowdown or downtown, rather than a recession.