Developing a strategy for your Fusion Marketing Plan begins with understanding which metric you want to measure on your path toward success. Say for example, you’re an author and your bottom line metric is “sell more books;” how will you get there? My plan involves the Five Ws that you may have learned in high school.

The Five Ws are: the who, what, where, when and why (or how) you will accomplish a task. The Five Ws were used heavily by reporters back in the 1890s because if a cub reporter could gather the information for those five questions, a story could be written.

In my example, “sell more books” (of if your example is to obtain more coaching clients, or bring in more patients, substitute your metric here) here are my Five Ws:

 • Who – the author or his team or marketing company

• What – sell more books, drive book sales

• When – it could be now, first quarter, by year’s end, etc. • Where – choose a location, national, local, international

• Why – to increase your bottom line • How – this is the function of your Fusion

 Marketing Plan

When it comes to selling books or driving sales, you need to ask “how” and the answers are varied, but include: raising awareness of the book, setting myself apart from the competition as an expert in my niche, exposing people to the content in my book through various means.

Now that you’ve started thinking about the Five Ws for your particular business, we’re going into the Seven Whys – a concept credited to Toyota.  The Seven Whys help you get to the root cause of a concept in which others may have said, “We can’t do that.”

Here is how I used the Seven Whys (in this instance it works best to change Why into How) in the workshops that I teach and for our example of “selling more books:”

The objective of the Seven Whys/Hows is to raise the level of awareness of my book. How can I do that:

• Use a direct mail campaign to garner free press coverage.

• Increase likes and activity on my social media platforms.

• Make more videos and promote my YouTube channel.

• Develop a radio campaign to promote the book.

• Work to increase attendance at my seminars (and then talk about my book there).

I urge you to take time to uncover your Five Ws then use that objective to drill down to your Seven Whys/Hows as a way to meet the objective you’ve set for yourself and your business. In future articles we will work on the tools you will use to meet the goals that you’ve set.

Lon Safko
– Author of The Social Media Bible & The Fusion Marketing Bible

lon safko, author, speaker, keynote, training, social media bible, fusion marketing bible