Suzanne Elshult, http://hrnow.net Executive Yak, sponsors live round tables for senior marketing and human resources executives in the Seattle area and offers executive / professional coaching and virtual learning opportunities for leaders, business owners, consultants and coaches committed to growth and high performance.

Are we as marketing executives getting bogged down in “what’s new.” When my Marketing Executive Roundtable group met recently on this topic we started out by asking ourselves two questions which resulted in a lively and productive discussion:

1. If I doubled my discretionary marketing budget today, what would be the first thing I would do?
2. If I cut my discretionary budget in half, what’s the first thing you would cut?

Should we be cutting that second thing to do more of the first? One executive who went through the exercise of asking the questions ended up analyzing the effectiveness of the “click to call” feature of an electronic newsletter distributed to dealers….turned out that zero calls were received and by cutting the feature saved significant budget. Another executive exploring what he would do decided he would cut telemarketing, invest more in the SEO/SEM world and spend more money on making press releases searchable. Just raising the questions made us all take a new and critical look at what we are doing, something we tend to do less frequently than we should as we get mired in tactics and the “most recent” cool thing to do.

In the course of the discussion, the group agreed that it is essential we understand and keep in front of us both traditional and new delivery channels for marketing messages. Traditional: PR, direct mail, tradeshows, telemarketing, advertising, brochures, sponsorships. New: Web, social, e-mail, mobile and guerilla. Our marketing teams must understand the 4 Ps and actively explore different ways the pie can be broken out, they must measure the effectiveness of different tactics, make sure that the message is consistent and that each tactic/touch reinforces and leads to the next level – integration.

We also had an interesting exchange around web sites and social media and the fact that some companies are now abandoning web promotions and working towards social media instead. Question: do we even need websites any more? On the other hand, what does having 40,000 fans n Facebook really get you?

Bottomline: these are questions that any marketing executive should make a habit of asking. Do it!