Most people would not make the connection that cooking and marketing have a lot in common; at first glance it does seem kind of crazy – what do marketing and cooking have to do with each other? As a person with a culinary arts background and extensive internet marketing experience, I can tell you: a lot!
Let’s see what we can learn:
1) Know your recipe
Before you start making something you should probably have an idea of what it is. Just as a chef would have a recipe for different aspects of their meal, a marketer should have a recipe for their marketing efforts.
Cooking Recipe:
1 onion
8 oz of meat
2 tsp spices
Social Marketing Recipe:
4 social posts
30 social engagements
5 social platforms
2) Get your ingredients ready before you start
Chefs have a term for this, it is called Mise en Place – French for “putting in place”. Just as a chef prepares their ingredients before they start cooking, a marketer should prepare their program before they start implementation.
Generate your content ahead of time, plan and schedule your social posts, prepare visual assets and site designs well in advance of your program launch. The last thing you want to do is start cooking without all of your ingredients.
3) Add everything in the right order
Every chef knows that the order in which you incorporate ingredients is very crucial to a good dish. Add your spices too early and they will burn; add your stock too early and it won’t thicken properly; add your meat too late and it won’t cook.
These same principles are true for marketing – add your elements in the right order. You don’t want to start building links to your site before it is built, or before you have implemented basic onsite optimization.
4) Let it cook
One of the most important parts of cooking, as well as marketing: let it cook! Once you put your ingredients in the pot, you need to let it cook. The same thing is true for marketing – once you implement your plans, you can’t expect immediate results. Marketing programs, especially internet marketing programs, take time to propagate before you will see measurable results.
None of this information seems really ground breaking; that’s because it isn’t! There is a reason that everyone from surgeons to pilots have simple checklists to remind them of the basics. Take a que from something as mundane as cooking and think about that the next time you are generating a marketing plan!
