Marketing involves simply 4 objectives being satisfied to ensure success and those 4 objectives are research, planning, marketing strategy selection, and optimization. With a lot of small and growing businesses, it is the case that you as the owner are the one who has been applying some type of effort towards a marketing strategy and your results has been underwhelming.
On top of running and managing your actual business, you’re also tasked with the additional stress load of marketing this business and let’s face it you’re severely lacking the information, the knowledge and the tool sets necessary to research, plan, execute and optimize a cogent marketing plan for your business. The time you are spending on your business is time you are not spending on research, planning, and optimization of your marketing strategy.
Generally this is what is delegated to a marketing, but let’s go into the four objectives that ensures a successful marketing system so you can understand it better.
Objective #1 – Marketing Research
Before you start to market your product, idea or service you want to first research a number of things such as the target market that you are going after and that would be most receptive or that would value this product or service the most. This is one of the most important facets of marketing and understanding where your product or service fits in the marketplace. You simply don’t want to target the whole world because as a growing business you have limited resources and so you want to define a niche that you can offer value to the most.
Only after you have optimized for that small niche that you are targeting, and you are making revenue, should you then decide to pursue a larger market because you now have the systems, the marketing data, testing and framework to move forward into a larger pool of prospects. A lot of growing businesses don’t do this and they remain stuck in the same place and that is usually a very intermediary stage.
Research is important because it lays the groundwork on which you’re going to truly build out the pillars of your marketing, once you understand who you’re going after, then you can put together the messaging that will be more engaging with that group. And you can better communicate value to that group. Absent of that it’s like a drop in the ocean, the effects will not be felt and the return is going to be less than stellar.
Objective #2 Marketing Plan
Next we move into the planning stage, in the prior research stage we had defined a lot of the elements that the marketing campaign would require given what type of business we’re working with. And so in the planning stage we are actually visualizing what’s going to happen, diagramming the steps and planning out an actual marketing campaign on the particular channel that we choose.
Depending on the business the best channel to reach potential customers could be pay per click marketing with Google Adwords or it could be targeting through Facebook marketing, it could be developing researched articles that answers the questions that potential customers have, and optimizing the content for the search engines (SEO). There are a number of different marketing methods that you can employ in marketing an idea product or service and it comes down to the research and planning which helps you to understand which one is going to be the best fit for your business.
The planning stage of the marketing campaign is where we define the lead generation and customer acquisition playbook. This is where we define where we should be as far as cost per click, conversion rates, how many leads we are planning to get per day per week per month, this is where all of these numbers and figures are defined.
Objective #3 Marketing Strategy Selection
The marketing strategy selection phase is a part of the planning phase but also is an independent part that you want to put some attention to when developing a total marketing objective for a product, service, or idea. On top of the planning phase, the marketing strategy selection is a time to review what is possible within the chosen marketing channels that will be employed for a particular marketing campaign. And what does that mean, well for instance if we decide to move forward with a pay per click marketing campaign than we’d want to look at remarketing and retargeting on top of the pay per click campaign.
Retargeting is a powerful facet of modern marketing today and is a layer of activity that we apply to a marketing campaign to push conversion rates through the roof. The marketing strategy selection phase is where we plan, define, and implement the tactics that are available within the marketing channel we’ve chosen. In this stage we further refine the prior two stages as we move forward. And at this stage We are forecasting results based on historical performance; this necessitates the fourth stage which is monitoring and optimization. So let’s look at what that entails.
Objective #4 – Marketing Optimization
A successful marketing strategy is dynamic, meaning that there is a feedback loop and that entails assessing the performance and activity of the marketing campaign and adjusting it accordingly to reach the goals that we set. This is where we are paying attention and taking data from the feedback we are getting from the marketing and then making adjustments such as increasing the cost per click or lowering it. Optimization of a marketing campaign is a 360° view and constant assessment of the marketing operation. In this stage we are tracking the metrics that are driving revenue we’re looking at the secondary drivers and assessing their performance, making adjustments as necessary and reviewing our goals and objectives to ensure.
The results of a successful marketing campaign is a booming business when everything is implemented appropriately. This requires a focused effort, knowledge, experience, and technical expertise. This is where we help clients. From concept to implementation we work together with clients to ensure success and we follow this with a monthly report defining all the core performance metrics and reviewing that with the client every month in order that they may see the results of their investment and ensure accountability.
