When you boil marketing down to its core, it’s really all about storytelling and a human-to-human connection. The mission and vision of the organization, the personality of the brand and the why behind the what—that’s the backbone of marketing. However, how we tell that story, who we tell it to and how we deliver it creates the bridge between strategy and execution. It’s how you communicate what you care about and why your business exists.
Establishing a strategy for your marketing plan is crucial in creating holistic, comprehensive and aligned efforts that actively advance you toward your goals. This is vital because it lays the foundation for effective marketing that’s rooted in real research and data. Without a strategy in place, you’re much more likely to have inconsistent messaging and improper market positioning, and you might even be targeting the wrong audience altogether.
I’ve found that business owners and decision makers often want to jump straight into specific marketing tactics, such as building a website, without taking the time to truly develop a strategy and ensure the tactics are aligned with the ultimate goals. With a website, for instance, there are important questions that need to be answered before delving into the design and development of the site itself.
What’s the goal of the website? What do you want it to do? Who is it for, and do you know how to speak to them effectively?
Taking the time to answer these questions will inform the direction and design of the website, and it will give you actionable goals you can track after the site is live.
Chasing Trends
This is the pitfall of talking about big annual marketing trends and advertising fads. Every year is going to see new technology, new trends based on consumer and market behavior and other changes that affect the landscape. But randomly latching onto different trends year after year and hoping for the best is an ineffective and messy approach to marketing.
This isn’t to say that you can’t plan to fold new trends into your marketing plan on an annual basis. Rather, it’s much more effective to create a comprehensive marketing strategy that accounts for annual trends.
To create a fortified marketing plan, I always start with defining the goal clearly, and then my team gets into the research and data. Research is really the fiber that binds and holds the marketing strategy together. Taking the time to conduct consumer research, market research and industry/competitor research is the only way to get the granular insights needed to inform an incredibly powerful marketing plan. It’s a lot to start with, but we work this way because we genuinely care about our clients and want to understand their businesses.
Beginning with a deep dive into the raw research doesn’t just shine a light on gaps in the marketing strategy—it also provides inspiration regarding what consumers want, where you’re currently positioned in relation to your competition and what tactics are currently working, either for the organization already or in that specific marketplace.
I view it as an ecosystem. The goal informs the research, those findings inform the tactics which together create the strategy. From there, we take the strategy into the market and measure the consumer response. This part is absolutely critical; we have to be open to the consumer response and understand that this is a living strategy that can be adjusted based on continual research and data analysis.
The goal also plays a major role in defining the exact metrics you want to measure. In the context of lead generation, a metric you want to measure is sales opportunities and volume. Did they increase? Decrease? Stay the same? No matter the direction, you need a way to measure the results so you can tweak the strategy as needed without starting from scratch and hoping that something such as a summer marketing trend saves your brand.
Follow the Data
This is where drawing from real research and data while building out your tactics and strategies will help direct you. Developing your initial tactics based on data will increase the chance of success at launch and will also supplement continual consumer research in discovering opportunities to pivot when necessary.
A benefit of working with a managed marketing team is that everything is rooted in research from the start, and we focus on designing a connected and cohesive marketing plan. A prospective client I met with recently was discussing how he’s managing at least four different relationships to cover his marketing efforts: a website designer, a brand strategist, a paid media specialist and a creative designer.
Not only are they juggling several external relationships at once, but none of these solutions are collaborating with one another. This is an ad-hoc approach to solving marketing needs, and it creates a really difficult knot to untangle as well as disparate or misaligned messaging.
When working with a managed marketing team such as Impact, clients receive support from an entire team of marketing professionals and specialists who are all on the same page, in day-to-day contact with one another, and who are all up to date on the direction of that specific marketing strategy for that client.
We start with a business assessment to learn everything we can about the business operations, leadership, story and the market itself. It helps us build a series of solutions that seamlessly fit into the client’s current business plan. The goal with managed marketing isn’t to disrupt any current operations—it’s to ask how we can better emphasize the things this business excels at and help them meet their business goals through storytelling and communication.
Fundamentally, this is why the managed marketing team at Impact operates with the philosophy that every organization is unique and deserves a custom set of solutions specific to their exact needs and business goals.
Taking such an individualized approach with every client also allows us the opportunity to constantly improve. With over 100 incredible people on our managed marketing team, there’s a deep pool of knowledge and perspective that comes from exposure to different industries and markets. We have the benefit of drawing from that entire library to deliver top-tier marketing solutions that have truly transformed businesses.
Effective Solutions
Helping small businesses flourish is unbelievably gratifying, and I simply can’t emphasize enough how much it means to me to be able to help real people and real communities find success and thrive. The diversity in experience also helps fuel inspiration and curiosity, two necessities in crafting unique and specialized marketing solutions for our clients.
Curiosity is something I often try to instill in my team and remind them to practice. Being genuinely curious about our client’s business, how they operate and what their current marketing landscape looks like is how we derive the insights we need to help them reach their goals. That’s another big point of emphasis for me; the entire managed marketing model hinges on the success and growth of the client.
Through asking questions and expressing authentic care and interest in the people, values, missions and goals that drive a business, we forge a genuine and honest relationship that opens the door for transparent communication and collaboration on the comprehensive marketing strategy.
In the space of strategic partnerships, it’s really easy to fall into the mindset of getting the data and getting out, especially in a world so focused on efficiency. Trying to develop a marketing plan with this mindset gets messy and effectively removes the most important element there is in all of this: the human-to-human connection. At the end of the day, we’re all just people.
With that in mind, I’ll end on this: your biggest differentiator is your ability to care.
