Overview
Multi-Stage Meta-Sourced Marketing Strategies are long-term self-funded organic approaches to building brand equity, engagement, and grass-roots support for companies, products, services, and causes.
Key Terms and Principles
- Meta-Sourced. Effective marketing goes up stream, down stream, and onto the shore. It reaches beyond the obvious boundaries to create the conditions that can foster an effective advertising, marketing, or promotions campaign. Public engagement and education programs around the themes help create positive and accurate viewpoints based on data-reliant facts.
- Multi-Stage. Marketing is not an event, it’s a process. The process of marketing is very much like project management, where stages are properly organized and synchronized for optimal results and outcomes. Just as farming requires working the soil, planting, caring for the crop, and then harvesting, marketing similarly requires a long-term process of interdependent events executed at just the right time.
- Organic. We’ve all seen poor quality content that has an unusually high number of views and likes. These are typically paid for, and aren’t sustainable without ongoing advertising costs. Organically based marketing builds natural alliances, and genuine consumer / supporter driven sustained growth. This makes the metrics of measured success more accurate and meaningful.
- Self-Funded. Most websites can be self-funded by unobtrusive advertising that complements the website. By monetizing the site, domain name registration, hosting, and other fees can be paid for. Social media channels can also be utilized to serve this purpose and generate revenue.
- Working the Soil. After mapping possible influencers, one begins to work the soil around the target area. See the What is Brand? chart below. These are the immediate influencers. Research, study, and explore the secondary and tertiary influencers.
Case Study Example
Let’s say you want to promote support for a new taxpayer funded swimming pool for your city. You could isolate your efforts on a single web presence and social media promotion campaign focused on “VOTE YES FOR THE POOL” with bumper stickers, window signs, and social media banners. However, such as campaign is likely to be too focused and possibly polarizing.
A multi-staged meta-sourced campaign would instead map out a few rings of influence around the immediate issue. A parallel campaign would be launched, without any mention of the city pool renovation vote. That parallel campaign would inform the public about the health and social benefits of swimming. The point it not to manipulate public opinion, but to accurately inform public opinion. Given sufficient facts, the conditions are created that will help foster a positive public attitude about swimming and public pools.
What is Brand?
Brand is much more than a logo, or a product experience. Brand is the ecosystem created around a company and what it offers society.
