This morning I had a very enlightening discussion with Rok Hrastnik, one of my partners in 3R Marketing. The conversation with Rok started out discussing self-reflection. Rok is nineteen years old and at that point in his life where his summer has been quite an education for him. He has, perhaps for first time, had to shoulder some serious adult responsibilities (very well. I may add). That's enough to make any young person tend toward self-reflection.

We got around to discussing why I do marketing on Internet. As those of you who have been to our web site or to my old Robomarketer site know, my son Ian, whose fifth birthday was a week ago, was diagnosed as autistic just after his second birthday. Ian is only slightly verbal. He communicates much like an 18-month-old, mainly with gestures and a few words. Like many autistics, Ian has a mild form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention deficit disorder, and hyperactivity. He can be somewhat difficult to be around if you don't know him. When he was diagnosed as autistic, my wife and I made a decision that one of us would always be available for him. Because of a lot of factors that are not relevant to this article, it became my responsibility to find a way to earn some money so that I could be available for Ian. That is what led me to Internet. Only logical, don't you think?

But what led me to marketing almost 20 years ago? If you are familiar with my academic background, you know that my degrees are in areas far from traditional education that people in marketing have. What drove me to become a marketer?

The one thing that I've always enjoyed doing is communicating with people, most especially one-on-one. I enjoy helping, teaching and encouraging people. To me, that's what marketing is about - or should be!

Remember, marketing is communicating with your prospects! Something that a lot of marketers forget is that prospects are people and need to be treated as such. They're not some statistics from a marketing survey. They are flesh and blood with hopes and desires and dreams. To be a good marketer you need to be able to understand those hopes, desires and dreams and make your marketing efforts tap into them.

What that means is that you need to have a positive view of human nature. You have to have faith in human spirit. You want your prospects to react positively to your marketing? Then touch their hopes, their dreams. And I don't mean with promises of lots of financial rewards. I honestly believe that most people are not motivated at their deepest levels by greed. Rather, appeal to their "higher instincts." For instance, if you really want to get my attention, don't promise me a million dollars in five minutes, but tell me this will help my children grow into kind of people that will make a positive contribution to human society.

I'm a firm believer that your marketing plan should be much more than this. To use some military terms, I think that a marketing plan should be "strategic" as well as "tactical." In other words, we should make sure that we focus on our entire plan, and how it works as a system, rather than just focusing on individual parts like classified ads or website copy.

Here are a few tips that I've used in past to help me create and visualize a marketing strategy:

* Think Backwards: I've found that best way to construct a marketing strategy is to start with thing you want to happen at END of marketing process, and then work back from there. That means that first step in creating your marketing strategy is to think about where you want to make your sale. Will it be on phone? Will it be on your website?

Once you have decided on what your "point of sale" is going to be, you can then start moving on to next step, which is getting your customers to that point. How will you get your customers to call? How will you get people to visit your website?

This is when you should also think about any other steps that might be needed. For instance, how much additional information will customer need before you send them to point of sale? Will they need repeated messages to get them to buy? By answering these kinds of questions before you start writing, you will be saving yourself a lot of time and effort later on.