This week’s biz hack is about how to hack your marketing and overall business recipe by first learning the recipe for creating a pancake.
This one actually comes from Christopher S. Penn. If you don’t follow him, check out his blog here. In a nutshell, he relates marketing to a simple pancake recipe. Here’s the essential elements of a pancake (or any recipe, for that matter):
- Flour: provides stability
- Milk: the liquid protein provides the gluten to further support the dough’s matrix
- Baking powder: further supports the dough’s matrix (or leavening) and gives the pancake its fluffy characteristic
Then of course there’s the salt, sugar, and oil to enhance the flavor and keep the pancake from sticking to the pan. So where is all this headed?
Well, the folks who know the foundation for a good pancake, and what each of the components does and why it is used, can then make any variety of pancake: paleo, vegan, gluten-free, chocolate chip, pumpkin, banana, blueberry, buttermilk… the list goes on. In these cases, you can swap out certain ingredients for others (cow’s milk for almond milk) or increase the amount of others to compensate for eliminating a particular ingredient.
Marketing, and even building your business, can also be thought of as a recipe in which the recipe is the tactic. Christopher puts it best: “If you just blindly follow marketing recipes without understanding what they do or what the outcome is supposed to look like, then you’ll forever be locked into the same way of doing things, rather than adapting to change.”
First, you have to know what your end goal is (what is the outcome supposed to look like) and the essential ingredients (the components that can’t be changed). Say, for example, you find a recipe that suggests you create a media kit and pitch, and you send it to the 25 top national media outlets. Taking a step back, what is this outcome of this? Establishing your brand’s messaging or story (a media kit and pitch force you to document this)? Building brand awareness and credibility (positive media coverage can do this)?
But media outreach is not the only route to achieving this outcome. You just have to know what those ingredients do. Then, you can determine what to change.
For brand awareness, if reaching out to media is not your gig, you can create an online advertising campaign, speak at notable conferences, or seek out awards for your company. The list goes on.
One last thing to keep in mind: while the recipe is the tactic (and a cookbook is your book of tactics), the strategy is the menu. It’s more of a high-level look at how each of the recipes fit together. For instance, when a chef is planning a tasting menu, they won’t start with a steak and red wine, then dish up a salad paired with a white wine to follow. For winter menus, they also tend to stick to more soul-warming foods, not light, cooling recipes. The season, your audience, your budget, and your goals will all impact your marketing menu (strategy) and the recipes (tactics) you use to achieve that outcome.
