marketing strategy

If Your Brand Lacks Identity, Your Team Lacks Purpose

  • On : October 19, 2021

It is an organization’s purpose and identity to serve as both a foundation for growth and a mirror to reflect its presence in the world. It expresses why a company exists, what problems there are to answer, and who it aspires to be to each person it encounters, which is essential when 64% of consumers say shared values with a brand is the main reason they maintain a relationship with the company.

When your company starts to wander too far from its primary mission, having a solid brand strategy in place helps you recognize it and focus on your brand promise. A comprehensive marketing strategy can keep you from making decisions that jeopardize your clients’ trust by mismanaging their expectations or breaching commitments. As your company grows, it’s critical to ensure that your entire staff is on board with your brand strategy and to guarantee it’s maintained and delivers to stakeholder expectations.

If your brand lacks identity, here’s why your team lacks purpose.

Typical Brand Identity Issues

A company suffering from a brand identity crisis can easily lead to low brand management, lack of efficient leadership, and poor communication. Being unable to interrelate a brand’s image with the team culture and expectations creates internal confusion within the team. Suppose staff and managers cannot understand what their company does, the target market and desired audience, their purpose, and how staff contribution fits the brand, then how can your team effectively sell your product/service offerings?

Consumers respect transparency when it comes to companies’ services, products, values, and goals. Providing your customers and stakeholders with inconsistent and inaccurate information about the brand is an easy way to kill your marketing efforts.

Customers and stakeholders also expect brands to understand their needs and help them find new products/services suited for their needs, with 48% of Americans holding these expectations. This means staff is required to produce performance and outcomes that align with the brand’s identity.

When a brand lacks identity, it creates issues when communicating to consumers and can spark inconsistencies in management. Management that is relatively ineffective in navigating their company through the complexities of determining its brand identity, poses a severe threat to its long-term viability. In most cases, the result is wrong positioning and alienation of potential leads and existing clients.

Company Culture

Future-proofing your business from failures and producing an organization that operates with integrity and authenticity forms the basis of your company culture and brand identity. Your brand promise and brand personality and characteristics are woven together to represent your company and its place in the market. However, if your company has a mismatched culture and brand, even productive staff members can be creating undesired results and have the wrong perspective on the company.

When thinking and acting in distinctive ways internally, you’ll be able to project the unique identity and brand image you want to communicate. Staff should be allowed to interpret and reinforce brand value when managing clients.


Aligned Brand Identity with Team Culture

When a company’s culture and brand aren’t interdependent, it’s often due to a disconnect between the team perspectives and customer expectations. The lack of awareness and engagement with your brand among staff is another sign of a mismatch between the culture and brand. Your staff should be aware of what distinguishes and differentiates your brand from competitors. Staff should know who the company’s target market is and what their significant demands and needs are (which should be outlined in your marketing strategy).

If your team doesn’t have direct client interaction, you can utilize the brand’s mission and values as decision-making filters and train them to deliver a positive customer experience. If staff believe they have no involvement in enforcing the brand and its positioning, it means your culture lacks brand identity and integrity.

How to improve your brand identity?

Distinct Identity

Start off by reviewing your company’s purpose as this is the crucial aspect that combines an external brand and internal culture together. An essential step for developing both a strong culture and brand.

Understanding Your Message

To explain brand identification and attract qualified leads, accurate messaging can be developed and incorporated into all marketing collateral. Prospects, leads, and customers should be able to quickly learn what your organization can accomplish by visiting your website and social media platforms.

Consistency

Another step you can take is to ensure a clear understanding between staff and managers of what the brand identity is and how it is incorporated at work and in consumer relations. Providing your staff with consistency in these areas is a vital short-term and long-term factor that will help consumers, employees, managers, and stakeholders clearly understand the brand and its identity.

A company’s brand identity communicates the message it wants to send to the public about itself. With a competitive market across many business sectors, it’s critical to have a strong brand identity and communicate this in key messages effectively to stakeholders. A business’s brand identity is unique and tells a story about what the company stands for, its mission, and its products/services. When your brand and culture are aligned and integrated, you can improve operational efficiency, precision, quality, boost your capacity, increase brand awareness and marketing and generate new business leads.

Image: Shutterstock 1300655989

The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing in 2021

The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing in 2021

  • On : December 21, 2020

Where eCommerce and Social Media Collide

We’ve already witnessed the introduction of eCommerce into social media most notably with Facebook Marketplace. This year, Instagram also launched its in-app shopping feature. Predictions for 2021 argue that this merger will become less of a trend and more of a permanent feature of online platforms as social media giants make it increasingly more accessible for all of their users to go from discovery to purchase without even leaving the platform. To keep afloat in the coming year, businesses will certainly have to adapt to platforms as they evolve and adopt new methods of driving sales.

The Necessity of Virtuality

This year, businesses turned to virtual events in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic out of necessity. Yet life post pandemic will likely continue to orient itself around the convenience and accessibility of online events. Companies across the board have found that the benefits of virtual events include access to an entirely new audience that isn’t confined to travel logistics or health concerns and instead allows for higher event attendance and participation. As such, social media will continue to be leveraged for online event promotion to a wider range of customers at a low cost with a higher return on investment.

From Personalization to Personal Commerce

Brands must have a personality, and what better way to communicate that than via social media platforms, where businesses can constantly reaffirm to their followers their ethos, image and relevancy. Moreover, there is an expectation of customers that brands will have developed an understanding of their personal preferences given the reality of first-party shopper data. Without necessarily being aware of it themselves, customers anticipate that a brand will have at least some idea of what they are interested in purchasing based on their previous interactions, and as such desire more intimate shopping experiences. The maintenance of relationships with repeat buyers is of the utmost importance when it comes to customer retention, and social media platforms increasingly offer brands more opportunities to track their engagement as a means of developing accurate customer profiles.

Culling in the Name of Prioritization

The social media renaissance has seen with it the birth of a multitude of different platforms on which companies strive to retain relevancy on. However, in doing so, many have risked spreading themselves too thin and compromising their reach. To circumvent this and reallocate resources appropriately, brands are opting to reduce the number of social media channels they manage based on those which are most engaged with. The benefit of this lies in that allows brands to prioritize creating more consistent content of greater quality on the channels they choose to stick with.

Don’t Fix it Unless it’s Broken

Pre-existing trends that will continue to perform well include ephemeral content, reliance on traditional platforms, and influencer marketing. Given the constantly shortening attention span of consumers, stories are the perfect kind of bite-sized advertising in their short, engaging and accessible format. As such, stories and other kinds of ephemeral content will continually be utilized by individuals and businesses alike. On the same note, ‘traditional’ platforms such as Facebook and Instagram will continue to hold precedence over younger platforms. TikTok, for example, has seen significant growth in 2020, however, this same growth is beginning to plateau with the rise in popularity of Instagram’s Reels feature. As with Facebook and Instagram, influencer marketing will continue to reign supreme. Not only is it more affordable for brands to invest in partnerships with prominent individuals as opposed to running exorbitant ad campaigns, but influencer marketing is also highly useful in helping brands achieve multiple goals at once, i.e., re-enforcing brand image at the same time as generating new leads.

Why Your Marketing Consultant Doesn’t Know It All

Why Your Marketing Consultant Doesn’t Know It All

  • On : December 18, 2020

Source: Marketing Eye Australia

There is this notion that marketing consultants should know it all. They are after all qualified in marketing and are employed to steer a company or brand with their knowledge and expertise. Sitting in my office in South Yarra, Melbourne, I am reminded at just how much experience is in the room, but while we are all skilled at what we do, we learn every single day something new. Our industry is evolving, growing, changing, adapting and being disrupted through technology and innovation.
When hiring a marketing consultant it is important to ask some basic questions:

  • What are your qualifications in marketing? How many years have you been working in marketing?
  • What areas of marketing do you specialize in?
  • Have you been successful in marketing? What does success look like to you?
  • What technologies do you use when developing a marketing campaign?
  • What industry-based experience do you have?
  • Do you develop a marketing strategy before going into marketing tactics? If so, what is included in the marketing strategy?
  • What key performance indicators should a company look out for?
  • What measurement tools do you use?

These are fairly standard questions that need to be asked of any marketing consultant you hire. Once you have passed the phase of asking basic questions, you should explore how the marketing consultant that you are about to engage with is going to work with you.

  • What is the process they use?
  • How do they determine whether they too want to work with you?
  • What does a successful client relationship look like?
  • How does a client get the most out of them?

They should in turn ask you some questions:

  • What does a successful marketing campaign look like?
  • What is your story? What is the brand story?
  • What makes your business different from your competitors?
  • Do you have a marketing strategy?
  • Who is your customer? How is this qualified?
  • Who are your competitors?
  • What are your budget and timeframe?

From there, you have the foundation for a relationship that can be nurtured and grown over time. Marketing consultants usually have certain personality types and sometimes doing a free personality profiling will help determine whether your relationship will be a good one.

Marketing consultants need to have the mentality that they don’t know it all but want to keep on learning. Having conversations about what websites do they get inspiration from, what podcasts do they listen to and what was the last book they read, can help you ascertain just how up-to-date they are with marketing and how keen they are to learn more.

Marketers only have a limited amount of time each day and mostly they are working ‘in marketing’ not ‘on marketing’. Good marketers do both.

Commonly Made Marketing Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)

Commonly Made Marketing Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)

  • On : December 16, 2020

There is a never-ending list of ways businesses can improve their marketing strategies. These lists make it easy to focus on what to do, though they seldom spend enough time placing emphasis on what not to do. Even the most experienced marketing executives trip up sometimes and make easily avoidable mistakes. We’ve identified some of the most commonly made mistakes in the industry to help you circumvent them. If you’ve already made some of these mistakes, don’t worry – we’re here to help you learn from them.

Poor research and a lack of testing

Making assumptions about your customer base is a surefire way to miss goals before you’ve even given yourself a chance of reaching them. Before the launch of any project or marketing campaign, devoting the resources to developing an informed understanding of your audience that is founded in substantial research can save you valuable time and money down the line. Having an idea of how your products and services will perform once your campaign is launched will help you set realistic and attainable goals. By identifying and eliminating ineffective ideas before they see the light of day, you can focus your energy on more promising aspects of the campaign. Given the multitude of research tools available to marketing executives today, there is no excuse to skimp on feedback surveys or trivialize trend analysis.

Broad targeting

A symptom of poor research is often targeting too broad an audience. In the age of targeted advertising, there is a wealth of data available to businesses that aid in the development of structurally sound customer profiles. As with inadequate research, making assumptions about your anticipated customer base is a common mistake that often overlooks the reality of your pre-existing clients and their loyalty to your brand. Worse, you risk losing them because you’re too busy chasing unrealistic leads. To avoid this, pair your research insights with your comprehensive customer profile and you’ll be far more likely to reach your campaign goals.

An unspecified USP

Your USP, or Unique Selling Proposition, is a single statement that sets you apart from the competition. It should make clear the gap in the market which your products or services fill, and directly address the needs of consumers in a way that your competitors are unable to. It is surprisingly common for businesses not to prioritize devising a strong USP. And yet without it, your customers will struggle to pick you out of a crowd of brands who are also competing for their attention. It is not enough to claim you are the best in the business. Rather, explain why this is the case, and how you set yourself apart from the rest of the industry. A USP is a crucial aspect of keeping your operations focused as it functions as a constant reminder of your target audience.

Devaluing customer retention

This is arguably the easiest mistake for marketers to make. Because burgeoning businesses are so often concerned with attracting new customers, they often miss valuable opportunities with their pre-existing ones. The potential growth of revenue by way of repeat business is certainly worth making a priority given that customer acquisition isn’t nearly as affordable or reliable as marketing to returning clients. In fact, selling to a new customer is five times as expensive as selling to an existing customer. In order to ensure that you are covering all segments of your market, try and match the resources used on gaining new clients to the resources used to take care of your pre-existing business.

Unwillingness to invest

We’ve all heard it before: you need to spend money to make money. And yet, clichés are clichés because, more often than not, they ring true. In a recent Score study, small business owners who listed marketing strategies as one of their top priorities also admitted to devoting negligible portions of their budget to actual marketing implementation. In retrospect, the majority of said business owners wished they had allocated at least twice the initial marketing budget prior to launch. While it is understandable that businesses opt to prioritize more pressing matters such as rent payments and payroll, undervaluing the capacity of effective marketing to reap long-term benefits to revenue and brand loyalty is certainly a missed opportunity.

Forgetting to track performance

While many businesses necessarily turn to data to devise their upcoming marketing campaigns, they often overlook the importance of tracking performance to date. The insights that tracking performance can offer are invaluable when it comes to setting realistic goals for imminent projects, as well as identifying areas for improvement before launch. Real-time insights into business performance make it easy to avoid unpleasant surprises and instead ensure that you are constantly in the know.

Resistance to change

Businesses, just like humans, need to adapt in order to survive. And, just like humans, some businesses often resist change in the name of staying in their comfort zones. But by doing so, they miss out on the valuable potential of change to beget growth. Resistance to new technology and marketing strategies puts you behind those more willing to experiment with different revenue channels, whereas businesses who are more open-minded to change are opening themselves up to a wider audience and greater potential profits as well as keeping up with the competition.

How Storytelling Can Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy

How Storytelling Can Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy

  • On : December 10, 2020

Source: Marketing Eye Atlanta

Content creation, in its simplest form, is storytelling. Telling stories is part of the fabric of humanity. Starting with cave drawings and folklore, the art of storytelling has transformed into what has become one of the fastest-growing and innovative industries today: entertainment. People go to see movies to get swept up in the drama, romance, and action of the latest narrative. If people have an emotional response to these kinds of stories, what’s keeping them from connecting with your story? Crafting content through the lens of telling a story gives your audience a great opportunity to connect to your brand and your product. Everyone has an interesting story. You just need to figure out how to tell yours. Below, we have some ways that storytelling can dramatically improve your content marketing efforts.

Tap into an emotional connection

If you’re looking to connect with your audience, consider using emotional details as a sort of hook for the reader. The “voice” of your brand should be passionate and energetic, informing and educating your audience on all the good that your company can do for them. People will be interested in your story, so don’t be afraid of sharing the journey of your company. That’s right, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Failures are just as important as success. Additionally, you can address the various problems that your solution fixes, drawing on customer stories.

Tell authentic stories

Telling authentic stories is the only way to truly boost your content marketing. Making up stories about your brand or your product is a recipe for disaster. There are plenty of examples of fabricated stories backfiring, which is a PR nightmare. Take the time to work on the angle to your story:

  • How did your business get started?
  • What’s your history?
  • Who is the hero of your story?
  • How has your product/service helped your customers?
  • What do you have to offer?
  • What are your biggest failures?

Authenticity helps to build brand loyalty and trust. If your audience sees that you are putting out fake stories, it will be hard to win their trust again.

Let your customers tell their story

The best weapon in your content arsenal is the word of your own customers. When your customers have a great experience, you can get a lot of mileage out that relationship. A great experience equips and empowers your customers to share their experiences with others. People are much more likely to trust the opinions of those who have used a product or service. If people know that your company provides a quality product and excellent service, they will be much more likely to convert as opposed to a simple cold call. Their testimony will have a much greater influence on your target audience.

Source: Marketing Eye Atlanta

The Top Marketing Strategies Deployed By B2B Content Marketers

The Top Marketing Strategies Deployed By B2B Content Marketers

  • On : December 7, 2020

There are a lot of different forms of marketing these days, you could be forgiven for losing track of which is which.

This article focuses on how your business can effectively execute B2B or business-to-business content marketing; what it is, and why it is an important area for your business to have efficient marketing strategies in place.

What is B2B marketing

B2B marketing can be a challenging area to excel in, with so many businesses competing for the same goals, partnerships and customers.

Business-to-business marketing refers to the marketing of products or services to other businesses and organizations, as opposed to B2C marketing that focuses on marketing to consumers.

Ultimately, B2B marketing content is generally more informational and straightforward than B2C, as corporate decision-makers are more concerned with how these business decisions will affect their ROI, finances and future growth.

The aim is to expand your business’ audience whilst developing brand affinity and driving sales by appealing to other businesses who have a need for your product or service.

There are many different types of B2B marketing that your business can use, the majority of which are similar to B2C marketing tactics, only the way you create your content is very different.

The main types and channels are:

  • Blogs
    • Updating blogs regularly can create more traffic for your website and keep your audience interested, as long as the topics and forms of blogs you create stay relevant and shareable.
  • Social Media
    • There are so many social media channels out there for you to reach your audience. B2B marketing generally has a LinkedIn focus, but there is no reason you cannot utilize other platforms to research and engage with your customers as much as possible.
  • Email
    • Many businesses utilize email marketing for lead generation and relationship management. This tactic keeps your brand top-of-mind while also enhancing the lead nurturing process; bringing efficiency, meaning to content and actionable results.
  • Videos
    • You can upload and share videos using all of the above formats. This medium is a great way to engage your audience and present the features of your business in an in-depth fashion.
  • SEO
    • By ensuring your site contains the right keywords for your audience, you will be able to rise up in the search engine ranks and create higher website traffic.

As long as your content produced in these formats is aimed at enticing businesses rather than appealing to your usual customers, these channels and techniques can be a great way of promoting your brand to other businesses.

The best approaches for creating a B2B marketing strategy

With so many approaches to B2B marketing available today, it can be difficult to decipher which is the best of the lot.

But there is no one size fits all way of tackling this problem, there are many different ways your business can utilize B2B marketing to attract other organizations to your services.

So, we are going to outline a few different approaches adopted by the best that you can tailor to the needs and functions of your business.

Approach 1

Develop an encompassing vision for your strategy and define your market:

  • Outline specific and achievable business goals.
  • Create a B2B marketing strategy around these goals, so that your primary focus is on ticking them off.
  • Constantly check that your audience is engaged and that sales and marketing are on the same track.
  • Can you actually measure the results of each of your goals?
  • Your audience should be much narrower than that of B2C businesses; conduct research to identify your ideal customers.

Identify possible channel types to run your campaigns:

  • Decide how you will reach your target audience and ensure you know features about your ideal customers.
  • Understand how your audience is spending time online, which social media channels they use the most and how you can offer them products and services that your competitors cannot.
  • Ensure your campaigns advertise the right message; include calls to action and sophisticated language, as the businesses you are appealing to will have a prior understanding of your product or service when it comes to B2B marketing.

Measure results, make adjustments, and go again:

  • Understand why some content works better than others so that you can make future investments in your strategy wisely.
  • The audience is key; use analytics tools to determine where consumers are engaging the most, what channels they are using and focus on these areas in the future.

Approach 2

Identify your ideal audience

  • Develop market segments and try to create smaller groups of potential consumers so you can better identify what each business will be able to get out of your organization.
  • Utilize tools such as Google Analytics to find out more about your target customers in terms of demographic information and their interests that may help you further narrow down your potential customer base.

Develop new content ideas continuously

  • Once you have identified your audience, you need to provide them with topics and content as consistently as possible, by observing what your audience is talking about on social media.
  • There are a number of tools available developed specifically for B2B marketers that you can use to analyze and track keyword searches for you.
  • Use what you already know about your audience to anticipate what they want to read and learn about, your content, especially for B2B marketing, needs to provide an obvious benefit to your audience, otherwise, they will have no need to be engaged with you.

Test and promote your B2B content

  • LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook can be a great way to test with your audience what they want to read and learn about by creating polls and asking questions and generating conversations.
  • By this time, you should have a much clearer idea of what your audience and other businesses are looking for from your organization, and you can begin to promote your brand through as many channels as possible, such as social media, EDM’s, blogs, podcasts, etc.

There are many examples out there of businesses who are have adopted excellent B2B marketing practices. Ultimately, there are many different approaches to B2B marketing that could suit your business, and we have just provided you with a few options today, but it is up to you to decide which of these practices you adopt so that your business can effectively develop a B2B content marketing strategy.

How To Increase Your ‘Net New Leads’ With The Right Marketing Strategy

How To Increase Your ‘Net New Leads’ With The Right Marketing Strategy

  • On : November 27, 2020

With only a little over a month to go, many businesses are buckling down and prepping for the new year. Smart businesses finding that by having a plan in place, they are 313% more likely to achieve their goals.

Marketing is one of the most important things a business can do. Not only does it help build brand awareness, but it is also essential to generate leads, increase sales and engage customers. When competing against big names, strategic marketing enables companies to play the field.

The efficiency of many core business functions is dependent on a good marketing strategy or plan. But, in case you’re one of those businesses that don’t mind sitting on your hands and procrastinating, here are a few reasons why you get up and start moving.

To begin, here some reasons why you need a marketing strategy:

  1. Provides a blueprint for navigating the current business environment.
  2. Helps you gain an edge over your competitors, especially if they don’t have a plan in place for the new year.
  3. Makes you less reliant on key people of your organization or strategic partnerships to supply leads.
  4. Ensures you allocate the right resources, both internally and externally, to meet marketing requirements.
  5. Identifies your target audience’s pain points and how you should communicate with them.
  6. Differentiates your company from the competition by identifying a unique value proposition.
  7. Provides the business with focus and direction by identifying where the best opportunities lie and what threats need to be avoided.
  8. Delivers best practices through smart marketing initiatives.
  9. Formulates your content strategy and highlights which platforms are most appropriate for your business to generate leads and build engagement.
  10. Sets key performance indicators that keep your team liable – no more ad-hoc work and hoping for the best!

In short, whether you’re targeting B2B leads or B2C, a marketing strategy provides the strategic direction on how to bring in ‘net new leads’.

Lead Generation

At the center of every marketing strategy is its lead generation focus, which has come to be one of the most important elements of growing a healthy business. A well-developed marketing strategy encompasses not only the steps to attract and convert leads but also the process of nurturing them once converted.

For example, you meet a potential lead at a networking event. Once you have made that connection, you then go through the steps for securing that lead after your initial encounter, namely connecting with them on social media and sending them regular EDMs.

Here are some key lead generation tactics that all good marketing strategies must have:

  1. Social media marketing

Social media has grown to be an essential element of every business’ marketing strategy. And since it isn’t going away anytime soon, it important to understand how you can harness its power for lead generation.

Crucial to the success of this tactic is first determining which platform your target audience is using.

If you’re targeting B2B customers, LinkedIn needs to be the focus. Built specifically for professionals to network, publish content, and connect with people you’d like to do business with, this platform is an excellent way to generate ‘net new leads’.

If you’re a B2C business, Facebook and Instagram are the way to go. Focus on getting more followers and optimize your page and profile to your specific audience. Publish relevant imagery and content that entices them to convert to your brand.

Often giveaways and contests help with boosting engagement. By inviting people to sign up, you are also able to build your database and further enhance your lead nurturing process through drip-feed email marketing campaigns.

  1. Google AdWords

In an article written by Autogrow , they share an excellent example of the smart use of Google AdWords. While the company in this case only had 1,000 unique visitors per month, they were still able to perform successfully, considering their traffic.

By using highly relevant keywords on website landing pages through Google AdWords, businesses can create a direct link between what customers are looking for and how their solutions are the best option to meet their needs.

High intention keywords often include the term “service” in them. The intention is that the customer is searching for a service so they can schedule a consultation and/or make a purchase decision.

Examples include, “ERP solutions” or “software implementation service”.

Marketing strategy technologies like Robotic Marketer are able to do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to developing a lead generation strategy. Identifying both high intention and low intention keywords, the artificial intelligence behind the technology is able to rank search queries based on their competitive relevance and provide you with an in-depth report (that can lead to a commercial transaction) as part of the deliverable.

  1. Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most trusted sources when it comes to providing relevant information to B2B buyers. Some organizations see email marketing as providing leads that account for 58% of all revenue.

However, with ever-changing technologies and buyer habits, it’s all hard to keep track of. Well-developed marketing strategies provide you with insight into the current trends of the market as well as recommendations to achieve high open rates and qualified leads.

For example, marketing automation software helps you target a much larger audience – in turn generating twice the amount of business leads than a manual campaign. You’re also able to schedule regular campaigns (to help with consistency) well in advance, which will help you stick to crossing out tasks within your strategy. Your marketing strategy should include a list of topics that are most relevant to your target audience and the cadence to achieving them.

While leads may start at a single touchpoint, the lead generation process involves capturing leads, communicating regularly and converting them into customers. Having a marketing strategy is proven to be successful in maximizing your sales effectiveness.

Why You Are Likely To Succeed With A Marketing Strategy

Why You Are Likely To Succeed With A Marketing Strategy

  • On : November 27, 2020

As business owners move forward into 2021, many are considering the changes that need to be made to their marketing strategy for success in the New Year following the countless challenges of 2020.

As the core channel through which businesses communicate their value with potential customers and retain clients in the long-term, marketing should always be a key focus for businesses seeking to expand their operations.

Investing carefully in marketing to grow your business in the digital space is vital to maintain a competitive edge in the face of ever-changing digital marketing services and media platforms.

To facilitate this, a marketing strategy is critical to making sure that your marketing activities are as impactful as possible, acting as a guidebook to allow you to focus on the most powerful actions that you can take as a business.

As specialists in creating tailored, effective marketing strategies for small and medium businesses, here are some key reasons you are more likely to achieve success with a marketing strategy.

A marketing strategy allows you to cover your bases

Marketing strategies outline research-based methods of improving your digital presence and growing your reach. A tailored strategy explicitly outlines actions that will improve customer experience and make your business stand out from the competition.

Whether this be posting regularly on social media channels, having a well-designed website, or creating quality content for your audience, a strategy allows you to cover your bases and ensure that there are no gaps in your marketing efforts.

This means that marketing activities can be focused on tasks that will deliver the highest impact possible and also bring you up to speed with competitors.

A marketing strategy helps you achieve your business goals

A marketing strategy should not be a cookie-cutter approach, but rather a specific approach for your organization me i.e. it is closely aligned with your business goals.

Regardless of the nature of your business and your objectives, a smart marketing strategy will outline key steps to take to achieve them.

Whether you are looking to gain more long-term clients, expand internationally or launch a new product, a marketing strategy will help you to plan and execute marketing activities that will help you achieve your business goals.

A marketing strategy takes the guesswork out of marketing

As a business owner, you want everything that you do to actively contribute to your business whilst avoiding marketing activities that cost more than the benefit they deliver.

A tailored, research-based marketing strategy enables your business to only engage in impactful marketing activities.

By discussing with a marketing consultant and your internal marketing team in developing your strategy, you are being decisive about the activities that will and will not benefit your business, providing clarity in the actions you will take, allowing you to plan and budget more effectively for future periods. For this reason, a strategy takes the guesswork out of your marketing activities.

By clearly outlining what exactly you need to do, you can focus on maximizing the ROI on marketing, ensuring that your marketing activities are cost-effective and aligned with your objectives.

A well-defined strategy allows for better collaboration

When you have a clearly defined marketing strategy, it makes it easy for all members of your organization to familiarise themselves with your key branding, messaging, and image. This enhances the presence of your organization, since having consistent branding is crucial in a digital setting, but also has the added impact of making it easy for multiple team members to collaborate or share tasks with each other.

A strategy establishes a rule book for anyone working on marketing activities and ensures that all marketing efforts are consistent and of high quality. This means that team members do not need to reinvent the wheel when they work on marketing-related activities, but rather have a clear guide to make sure that their work is impactful and in line with the strategy and the goals of the organization.

It helps you with future strategies

Your marketing strategy should not be the same every year. Having a clear marketing strategy allows you to see what worked and what didn’t, allowing future strategies to be adapted around these observations.

If something hasn’t worked in a specific year, you can remove that from your strategy and if you have discovered a new, creative way to engage your target market, you have the freedom to implement this in future strategies.

All of your future marketing strategies will become iterations of past strategies, leveraging the experience and knowledge of your successes. This means that each strategy is more likely to have a significant impact on your business. Therefore, a marketing strategy can be viewed as a valuable asset in the long-term growth of your business.

By putting thought into your strategy now, and revising it in future periods, you can add valuable knowledge and insight into all future strategies, improving the impact of marketing activities and the strength of your brand in the long run.

With so many benefits to your business, a clear marketing strategy is a necessary ingredient to success. With a well-defined strategy, you are likely to gain clarity in the actions you need to take to have a maximum impact on your business and drive engagement and reach.

When planning your business strategy and goals in the new year, ensure that you focus on reviewing your past marketing strategies or implementing a clearer strategy if this is something that has not been done in past.

Investing time into your marketing strategy can lead to immense short- and long-term benefits, allowing you to help your business thrive.

How Robotic Marketer can help

If you need help developing or refining your marketing strategy, the experts at Robotic Marketer are here to help. Contact us today and allow us to help you create an impactful marketing strategy for 2021 that is centered around your unique needs and business goals.

How To Know If Your Marketing And Sales Teams Aren’t Aligned

How To Know If Your Marketing And Sales Teams Aren’t Aligned

  • On : November 23, 2020

Source: Marketing Eye Atlanta

Sales enablement is the practice of aligning your sales and marketing efforts to generate leads and convert them to sales. While both departments have similar goals, they each take a different method to accomplish these goals. Companies that experience misalignment of the sales and marketing departments are often dysfunctional, struggling to convert leads and generate revenue. Below, we discuss how you can know when your marketing and sales departments aren’t aligned.

Each department has different objectives

Marketing departments are typically only focused on marketing qualified leads (MQLs), which is how marketers can measure their performance and success. Unfortunately, this isn’t fair to the sales team. The sales team is judged by its ability to convert leads into customers, which means they need a good set of leads to make that conversion.

Lack of communication between departments

When you are trying to align the marketing and sales departments, you need to establish constant communication between both parties. Each department has to have a deep understanding of the goals and strategies, allowing them to set their own expectations for what they need from each other. Any lack in communication will only foster dysfunction and division between the marketing and sales teams.

Lack of engaging content

Marketing teams are responsible for creating engaging content to support and nurture the customer relationship. Because of their responsibility in this relationship, marketers are uniquely positioned to create engaging marketing and sales content meant to educate and inform the audience. Your sales team is responsible for engaging with the customer one on one, but that doesn’t mean they are equipped to build collateral. Without engaging, well-crafted content, your organization is at risk of losing a sale.

About Marketing Eye Atlanta

Marketing Eye Atlanta is a results-driven marketing agency that is dedicated to supporting and elevating the marketing efforts of small to medium-sized businesses. With our consultative approach, we develop a marketing strategy that is specifically designed to help you achieve your business goals and objectives. Our goal is to help your business succeed. Contact Marketing Eye Atlanta today to learn how we can help you.

Source: Marketing Eye Atlanta

3 Tools to Measure Brand Awareness and Why You Should

3 Tools to Measure Brand Awareness and Why You Should

  • On : November 18, 2020

Source: Jeff Bullas

Every brand wishes to become famous. Well, every entrepreneur, business owner, and marketer wishes for its brand to become famous.

But as you might guess, popularity doesn’t happen overnight. Not for brands. They don’t wake up famous; instead, slowly and steadily, they grow brand awareness.

What is brand awareness?

Brand awareness defines the extent to which consumers are familiar with the qualities or image of a particular brand of goods or services.

The goal of marketing, PR, and even customer service is to grow brand awareness – to make sure people know the brand, talk about it, and recall it when the brand’s industry is discussed. These are the primary perks of brand awareness, but there are others, too.

Read More

Source: Jeff Bullas

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