Marketing sometimes feels like shouting into the void, unsure if your messages are hitting the mark. The key to changing the narrative? A smart strategy that’s impossible to ignore.
Consider these 4 areas when crafting your marketing strategy:
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Fight clutter in your strategy.
As marketers, our instinct is to do it all and to meet every need. We want to tackle every opportunity with urgency, which can leave our marketing strategy cluttered and without priority. Instead, we need to fight the clutter and start where the opportunity lies.
What’s our competitive advantage? Where is there opportunity in the marketplace? Where do we excel against our competitors? What change in our audience’s behavior is realistic and will create an opportunity for additional growth? What’s happening in our industry that presents a timely opportunity? Once we find these most impactful areas, we must hone our strategy to focus our tactics and attention where it matters most.
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Stay curious.
Normalcy isn’t interesting and it rarely yields insight. Instead, find the anomalies and let your curiosity lead you. When you find something that performs differently than you expected or a data point that’s an outlier, dig deeper. When you see something weird, different, or off, ask why. Why does our audience over-index for a behavior? Why do they act a certain way online? Why do they react strongly to emotional appeals?
Often, research can not only reveal these quirks but also give context and explanation. Dig into the available research, or conduct your own to find the important strategic context around the issue. This invaluable information can help you develop your strategic hypothesis.
Critically, you must stay curious through testing your approach. Be brutally honest with yourself with both successes and failures; that’s where true learning happens.
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Challenge your gut instinct.
As a society, we often value our gut instinct or tell each other to trust our inner voice. As marketers, we often need to do the complete opposite.
When we’re marketing to a group or audience, they rarely look just like us. We can’t expect them to react like us, so we instead have to challenge our personal instincts. Quantitative studies, qualitative methods like focus groups and interviews, and social listening help us get inside the mind of our target and push back on our unconscious biases. This information can inform journey and empathy maps, helping us better understand our audience, their motivations and decision-making process, all invaluable tools in a marketer's arsenal.
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Be accountable to your word.
Marketers are known to have a flair for salesmanship, but it’s more important than ever in today’s internet age to be accountable to our word. If we stake our claim around a certain product feature, we must be confident that we can live up to our hype.
Today’s consumers are savvy and somewhat jaded. A review-based economy has developed to help consumers research companies and find out how trustworthy they are. Stretching the truth in our marketing efforts to claim a premiere position might be tempting in the short run, but the potential damage from dissatisfied customers isn’t worth the risk.
Instead, we need to create our strategic approach and campaigns with integrity, centering our messages around what we can prove, day in and day out. By staying accountable to our messages, we can not only build trust with our potential audiences but also more effectively retain our current customers.
Crafting an effective marketing strategy can often feel easier said than done. If your brand needs expert help to get started, our experienced marketing strategy team can help you hit the mark and drive results that matter. Give us a shout.
