A recent post by David Meerman Scott on the Marketing P’s got me thinking about how my attitude toward marketing has evolved over the years. I graduated with an MBA concentrating in international business and marketing. During the course of my study, I conducted primary research and prepared fancy marketing plans as part of our hands-on coursework, of course addressing the traditional 4 P’s. We read case studies on things like how to determine whether a company should open a manufacturing plant in an offshore country, and we learned how successful businesses like Coca Cola and Komatsu conducted themselves.

Since then, I’ve learned that you don’t always have an entire year to “plan” your marketing – especially when you work for a small business and want to stay nimble. These days I’m engaged in what sometimes feels more like “scramble marketing”. You scramble to get out the door as much as you can when it comes to marketing efforts that you know will resonate with your audience. You don’t hem and haw too much, or nothing will get done. There’s always a reason not to do something (maybe this month’s newsletter article will only be appreciated by a particular customer segment, maybe a blog will sometimes expose too much of your business’s inner workings, maybe there are better keywords a press release should target, and on and on).

In today’s marketing environment, where your customers want to (and can!) control what messages they receive from you, I’m feeling like scramble marketing is what’s working best. Of course you need some structure and strategy to guide your efforts. But when you’re scrambling, you’re more likely to be real, transparent and believable – you’re being yourself and you can relate to people on an honest, personal level. After all, your customers are people, too.

So, scramble to get that great story up on your Facebook page, scramble to keep your Twitter account updated, scramble to pull together the newsletter and blog posts that help keep your clients in touch with you… It’s the small business marketing attitude, and it’s the way to be real in a business environment increasingly relying on the Internet and social media optimization.