So you’re ready to get your marketing rear in gear and put together a solid strategy to guide your business into the future. You’ve got ideas and you’ve got goals, and you’ve even got a partner to help you put it all together and make those marketing initiatives happen.
But before you jump into it, you need to have your marketing ducks in a row — this is particularly important if you plan on paying someone to put together your strategy. You don’t want to waste your time or theirs.
Here’s what you need to organize before you put together your marketing strategy.
1. Marketing Assets
Most businesses have made some sort of attempt at marketing in the past, which means there are some marketing assets lying around that you might be able to use, or use in a different way, in your new marketing initiatives.
For example, you might have an old brochure that you only had printed once and that you never really used. This might have some super useful content that you can use on a new brochure or on your website.
Every business has a logo, but the actual high-quality files are critical to putting together new marketing collateral. Otherwise, you might have to pay someone to recreate your logo from scratch.
All content is useful content. Anything you’ve used or written can be the basis for new content or can be reused to support new marketing initiatives.
2. Reporting and Tools
If you’ve done any sort of marketing in the past, you likely have access to a variety of reports and tools that you can use to analyze the effectiveness of your marketing.
Maybe it’s just Google Analytics and Google Search Console for your website. Maybe you’ve run Facebook ads in the past. Maybe you have a keyword research tool or a CRM. All of these tools contain potentially useful data.
Any good marketing strategy is going to benefit from any data you have. It can help you better understand where opportunities for big marketing wins are while helping you avoid marketing efforts that haven’t worked in the past.
Get together all your logins and accounts in one place so that, when you’re ready to put together your marketing strategy, you and your marketing team can access and analyze that data quickly.
3. Ideas That Were Never Implemented
No one knows your business better than you. If you had ideas for marketing efforts or content that you never put into place, now might be the time to look at those ideas and see if they have potential.
Maybe you made some outlines for blog posts that you never wrote. Maybe you put together information for a brochure that never got made. Maybe you made some notes for a new project website that never got off the ground.
All of this is valuable. It helps your marketing team to better understand what they need to market and provides some clues as to how to market your business. That content can contain valuable insights, and you might realize that it’s time to take those ideas and put them into action.
Got All Your Marketing Ducks in a Row? Let’s Talk
Once you’ve gathered together all this information, you’ll probably realize that you’ve followed a shotgun approach. You tried this and you tried that, but nothing was ever really coordinated.
Now it’s time to take a look at everything at once and develop a cohesive strategy that will propel your business into the future.
If you’re ready to put together a marketing strategy, we’d love to help.