Before I tell you what we’ve been working on, I want to give our Chamber members a little heads-up because the very first Marketing Mission has a deadline attached to it.

Marketing Mission #1 is: Get in the Bag!

We’re getting ready to put together our fall Chamber swag bags, and we’ll be collecting items from businesses through the end of September. So, if you already have promotional items sitting around your office, start gathering them up. If you don’t have fancy swag yet, don’t let that stop you either. A business card, a little candy, and something fun can be a perfectly good place to start.

We’ll share more about that mission separately, but I wanted to tell you now because you don’t need to wait for us to finish what we’ve been building before you can get started.

And yes, we’re still building it.

It Started With Our Onboarding Process

Over the past few months, we’ve been looking at what happens after someone joins the West Jordan Chamber. We want our onboarding process to do more than welcome you, give you some links, and wish you luck. We want members to understand what they have access to, how to get involved, and most importantly, how to actually use their Chamber membership.

As we started mapping that out, though, we kept finding things we wanted our businesses to do that didn’t quite belong in onboarding.

We wanted to remind them to put something in our swag bags. We wanted to help them think about how they introduce their business to the community. We wanted them to participate in visibility opportunities, tell their story, make connections, and think more intentionally about who they’re trying to reach.

The list kept growing, and eventually it became pretty obvious that we were trying to squeeze an entire marketing conversation into our onboarding process.

So, instead of doing that, we decided to give marketing its own journey.

Introducing the Marketing Mission Journey

The West Jordan Chamber Marketing Mission Journey will be an optional experience for Chamber members who want a little help getting more intentional about their marketing and taking advantage of the visibility available through the Chamber.

We’re calling them “missions” because I don’t want this to feel like another enormous marketing checklist.

Marketing can already feel like that. You’re told you need to post more, make videos, work on SEO, send emails, update your website, network, advertise, create content, build a brand, and somehow run your actual business at the same time.

That’s enough to make anyone decide to deal with marketing “later.”

Instead, we’re going to take it one mission at a time.

Some missions will be incredibly easy. You may already have everything you need to complete them. Others will introduce you to something you haven’t thought about before. Some may eventually have a class or expert attached to them so that, if you want to take that particular area of your marketing further, you can.

The idea isn’t that completing our missions will suddenly give you a complete marketing strategy. What we can do is help you build some good marketing basics, get you actively involved in the process, and help you become more intentional about connecting with the people you ultimately want your business to reach.

Your Chamber Can Be Part of Your Marketing Plan

One of the things I really want our members to understand is that Chamber membership can be a valuable layer of your marketing, but it shouldn’t be the entirety of your marketing plan.

Depending on your business, you may need a website, social media, email, advertising, networking, search visibility, community outreach, and plenty of other things. The Chamber doesn’t replace those.

What we can do is create more opportunities for people to encounter your business.

That might happen through a Business Beat, a Chamber Journal article, a ribbon cutting, a networking event, a community event, a collaboration with another business, an introduction, a swag bag, or one of the other visibility opportunities we continue to build.

But creating opportunities is only half of the equation.

We also need to help our members understand how to use them.

That realization has been a big part of building this Marketing Journey. I don’t want us to simply have a list of Chamber benefits somewhere on a website and hope that businesses figure out how to turn those benefits into something meaningful.

I want us to help you participate.

Marketing Doesn’t Have to Start With Perfect

That brings us right back to Mission #1.

At some point, I would love to have one of our Chamber members who specializes in promotional products teach us more about swag. There’s absolutely strategy involved in choosing promotional items. What makes someone keep something? What makes it memorable? What actually fits your brand? When is it worth spending more money?

Those are great conversations, and we’ll get there.

But I don’t want someone to hear that and think, “Well, I don’t have the budget for great swag yet, so I guess I can’t participate.”

You absolutely can.

Use what you have. Put your business card in a small bag with a piece of candy. Add something inexpensive and fun. If you already have promotional products, wonderful; get them out of the storage closet and into people’s hands.

You can make it prettier next time. You can make it more strategic next time. You can invest more as your business grows.

Sometimes the most important marketing lesson is simply not letting the version you hope to create someday stop you from doing something useful today.

I think that philosophy is going to show up quite a bit throughout this journey.

Learn Local Comes First

There’s also a reason this fits so naturally with what we’re trying to build at the West Jordan Chamber.

Our philosophy is:

Learn Local → Know Local → Trust Local → Support Local

We talk a lot about supporting local businesses, but people can’t support a business they’ve never heard of.

First, they have to learn that you’re here. Then they begin to recognize your name, understand what you do, and get to know the people behind the business. Over time, those interactions can build familiarity and trust, and that’s when “support local” starts becoming much more than a slogan.

Marketing is part of that process.

Not every mission we give you is going to immediately generate a customer, and that isn’t necessarily the goal. Sometimes we’re simply creating another opportunity for the right person to encounter your business.

Then we do it again…And again…And again.

That’s how visibility starts to build.

We’re Going to Build This One as We Go

Perhaps my favorite part of this project is that I’m giving us permission not to have the whole thing figured out before we begin.

The Marketing Mission Journey is going to be a work in progress.

We’ll start with the things we already know will help. As businesses participate, we’ll learn where people are getting stuck and where they want more education. We can bring in Chamber members with expertise to teach us. We can add new missions when we discover opportunities, and we can make existing ones better as we learn.

That feels much more useful to me than spending months behind the scenes trying to create the “perfect” marketing program before anyone ever gets to use it.

Our regular Chamber onboarding process will still be something every new member receives automatically. The Marketing Mission Journey will be different because not everyone will need or want it, so members will be able to opt in if they’d like to participate.

We’re working on that piece now, and we’ll share how to join the journey very soon.

In the meantime, you already have something you can do.

Your First Mission: Get in the Bag

Take a look around your office. Check that box of promotional products you ordered six months ago. Pull out your business cards. Think about something simple you could put into one of our Chamber swag bags that introduces someone to your business.

Then get it ready.

We’ll be collecting items for our fall swag bags through the end of September, so you don’t have to wait for the official Marketing Mission Journey to launch before you start participating.

This is only Mission #1, and there will be plenty more to come.

My hope is that, little by little, these missions help our members learn some marketing basics, become more involved with their Chamber, and create more opportunities to connect with the people they want to serve.

The Chamber can create a lot of visibility opportunities, but the real magic happens when our businesses actually step into them.

So, West Jordan businesses, your first mission is officially waiting.

Let’s get you in the bag.

Learn Local → Know Local → Trust Local → Support Local