Once a month or so, my wife and I invest our Sunday in the careful production of spaghetti sauce. We use her family recipe, which begins with 3 pounds of ground sirloin, 10 large cans of tomatoes and a page long list of vegetables, spices, herbs and other goodies – and ends with two very large pots of delicious sauce.
It takes about an hour to cook the meat, chop the veggies, and to measure and mix each of the other ingredients. Once everything is simmering on the stove, we wait patiently for 3+ hours while the concoction cooks. After eating the initial celebratory meal, we package up all the extra sauce and freeze it for future Sundays. Factoring in the shopping and cleanup, its long process.
The key elements to sauce success are the variety of ingredients and time. If any of the ingredients are neglected, the sauce does not produce the optimum result. Too little garlic or a lack of fresh basil can cause me to miss the target. Not enough patience will result in an undercooked, mediocre product that crushes my ROI.
Executing a marketing campaign is very much like cooking sauce. With meat and tomatoes you have a foundation that could sustain you, but with a variety of spices, herbs, vegetables and a splash of wine you have a delicious product that will feed you for a long time. Tasting the sauce early on will allow you to measure your progress, but will not be a clear indicator of your future results and return.
Integrating several web marketing initiatives will over time yield a superior result to traditional programs, as long as you are willing to wait until it has cooked long enough for all the flavors to come together.
Originally Posted by John Scranton on January 9, 2012