What Can Statues and Balloons Teach You about Your Marketing?

Does your marketing cover both types?

Do you employ a wide array of marketing vehicles? Do you struggle trying to understand if you're investing in the right ones?

I have a trick I use to help put marketing initiatives into perspective. It's a simple sort of lens, but it can give you the focus you seek when looking at the big picture regarding your marketing.

Think of any marketing device as either a statue or a helium balloon. Both have their strengths, and both can be extremely effective at delivering their message. But there are distinct differences.

Statues are stationary and essentially permanent. Once you learn a statue exists, it is easy to find it again whenever you wish, and you may visit it regularly if you derive a benefit. Helium balloons are obviously impermanent. When a helium balloon is released, it rises into the air, (usually) gets noticed by a number of people, and it quickly expires, often within a few minutes or maybe a few days. You cannot always be sure what path it will take, nor know exactly how long it will be visible.

Some statues are expensive to create, and most require regular maintenance, but they provide the bedrock of your marketing strategy. Helium balloons are relatively inexpensive, but you must be dedicated to launching new ones from multiple locations on a regular basis. Balloons are the worker bees of your marketing efforts. Let them swarm your target market. In some special cases, a helium balloon can even morph into a statue.

Let's break down a collection of marketing initiatives into these two categories.

Print Ad - helium balloon
Web Site - statue
Email blast - helium balloon
Blog post - helium balloon
Blog with RSS feed - statue
Directory Listing - statue
White Paper - statue
Tweet - helium balloon
Web ad - helium balloon
Podcast - statue
LinkedIn discussion - helium balloon
TV commercial - helium balloon
Web video - statue
Live webinar - helium balloon
Webinar archive - statue

Now that you have the concept, you can run all your marketing initiatives through this categorization. Do you have a good ratio, or are you too heavily weighted to one type while neglecting the other? Do your (temporary) balloons guide people to your (permanent) statues?

The next time you are in a marketing strategy meeting, discuss your current efforts as well as possible new initiatives in terms of statues and helium balloons. You will likely make better choices going forward.