Marketing can often seem overwhelming. With so many options, many of which can be enormously expensive, it can be hard to know where to begin.
However, with the right strategy in place and a clear plan to follow, your marketing can transform from a black box sucking away every dollar you spend to a powerful machine fueling your growth.
Getting Clarity Around Your Vision, Your Values, and Your Goals
When someone comes to us looking for a marketing strategy, it’s usually not just because their marketing isn’t working—in fact, many of our clients are getting results.
They’re often hiring us because they have no clue if their results are good or bad—and they’re wondering how they can maximize every marketing dollar they spend.
Many of our clients have gotten stuck in an old marketing trap: the shotgun approach. They’ve been trying anything and everything to see if anything works.
But even when marketing tactics do work, even when they work really well, they’re not always clear on why they’re working in the first place.
The same goes for tactics that don’t work—they just have to guess why each tactic isn’t working and money is being wasted.
When you walk through the process of creating a marketing strategy, you get clarity around your current marketing—why isn’t this working? Could it work? Are we doing something wrong? Could this work better? Or are we already winning here?
Once you have the answers to these questions and others, you can shift money and effort to the places where it will have the most impact.
Clarity Around Your Business
While getting clarity around your marketing efforts is critical for long-term growth, we often find that our clients lack clarity around their business as a whole—their vision for the future and the values that drive them.
This is a crucial component of any marketing strategy. We’ve had clients go through this process and realize that, even though their marketing is working really well, it’s not moving them toward the right goals.
By the time we’d clarified their vision for the future, many marketing processes had gone completely by the wayside, and new ones had to be implemented to move them in a new direction…
A new direction they didn’t even realize they needed until they went through the process.
It’s not always easy to say, “This is what we do and why we do it,” when you’re stuck deep in the weeds of everyday work.
Many business owners are living one week at a time. Taking a step back and thinking deeply about your business, your goals, and whether or not you’re protecting the values that mean the most to you probably isn’t part of that week.
While thinking about this every week isn’t necessarily practical, taking the time to do it even once a year can help you identify issues, measure progress toward goals, evaluate the goals themselves, and decide if a shift needs to happen.
Clarity Around Processes
If you’re like many business owners, you’ve got some processes that are working great, some that are just alright, and some that aren’t doing so hot—maybe even some that are outright broken.
But which is which? Most owners don’t have the luxury of designing their processes from the ground up and then testing and iterating—these are often cobbled together over many years, often by a variety of stakeholders.
Even processes that are working well might have major room for improvement, but there’s no way to know unless you look closely.
Why are some processes working but others aren’t? Why do you see major success here and stagnation over there? What’s driving each one?
Ignoring your processes is easy, but businesses that fail to scale often suffer from a process issue. Putting superior processes in place sets you up for major growth.
Better processes also make your business far more valuable. Buyers don’t want businesses where all the processes are stored in the owner’s brain (or the mind of a single employee).
That’s a highly risky purchase—how do they know the business will keep running once the owner leaves? How do they ensure that employees stay long enough to transfer their knowledge?
However, if you have standard operating procedures written down and in place, anyone with the right skill set can come in and take over. Risk drops, which means the value of your business increases.
This doesn’t just apply to your marketing processes (though those are obviously critical drivers of growth): This applies to every process in your business. You may be vastly limiting your growth in ways you never imagined thanks to a process you didn’t even realize was an issue.
Staying Consistent
While viral marketing moments are awesome and enviable, they’re far from the norm. Most businesses grow through consistent, iterative marketing that builds on what works and discards what doesn’t.
Once you’ve gained clarity on which marketing processes are working and which aren’t, you can make changes, but you have to give those changes time to work.
For most of our clients, we recommend you give any new marketing effort an absolute minimum of 6 months before discarding it (1 year is better). Not seeing immediate results is common—unfortunately, so is quitting before the effort has the chance to succeed.
Blogging and social media are both perfect examples of this. Most blog posts that hit the top spot on your search engine of choice took months to get there, if not years.
Social media followings grow slowly when your focus is on organic growth, but they do grow. And growing the right way is worth it.
While you can buy 100,000 fake followers right now, they won’t do you much good—but 1,000 real followers who are true fans of what you do? Those are people who make purchases (and then come back for more).
Every good marketing strategy is going to set guidelines for how long the process should be allowed to work before evaluating and pivoting. But what are you evaluating, anyway? It’s always content.
Being Constantly Creative (and Pumping Out Content)
What is marketing? At its core, it’s content—a message that you’ve crafted for potential and actual customers meant to move them to action.
That message is often (not always) paired with a visual design of some sort, whether that be the featured image of a blog post, the color scheme of a sales page, or even your logo and branding elements.
The importance of that message cannot be overstated, and the same can be said of the design. A message that’s confusing, overwritten, or even just unclear is a waste of marketing dollars. A design that’s ugly, lazy, or off-putting can keep people from even bothering to engage with your message.
Those messages—that content—can’t just be launched into the world once and then forgotten. The average person sees 5,000 to 7,000 marketing messages every day. If you want to compete with that, you need to pump out content on a consistent basis.
This requires a high level of creativity, and it’s not for everyone. A professional creative can often craft top-quality content in a few hours (or even less). A non-professional might need weeks to do the same.
It can also be hard to understand the quality of something you’ve made yourself.
While we do regularly meet clients who are producing high-quality content on their own, we’re just as often seeing the opposite—low-quality content that’s hurting them, that they don’t realize is low-quality.
The same goes for design, which can actively drive people away from your business if it’s bad. An ugly website, an unprofessional brochure, a poorly printed business card—these leave impressions on potential customers, and they’re not the impressions you want to leave.
In the world of marketing, we talk about, “feeding the content monster.” There’s always content that needs to be created, and if you’re doing it on your own, you’re almost certainly starving that poor creature.
This is very much a “hire the right person” situation, which doesn’t necessarily mean someone full-time or in-house—there are plenty of creative agencies and freelancers who do high-quality work without costing you even a fraction of the cost of a full-time employee.
Any good marketing strategy is going to take into account these creatives—the people who are going to create and manage your marketing content—and show you clearly where and how to use them for maximum impact.
Get the Clarity, Consistency, and Creativity You Need with a Custom Marketing Strategy
Marketing is tough, but with the right strategy, we make it easy for you.Learn more about Custom Marketing Strategies and how they can help you get the clarity, consistency, and creativity your business needs to thrive.