Understanding your clients, appropriately utilising data and measuring campaign performance are all vital elements for expanding your marketing operations.
However, the environment is continuously evolving, with new tactics and strategies being formed regularly. As marketing evolves, so should your business.
Learning how to strengthen your marketing strategy will only benefit your business when it comes to the all-important bottom line. In this article, we discuss ten ways to improve your marketing strategy:
1. Put in place a cross-departmental workflow
The internal workings of teams can be heavily affected by how other departments request projects and/or expect projects to be done. Once your workflow is in place, using a tool to assist with task assignments, deadlines, and follow-up can be highly effective.
2. Keep your target audience in mind
The ‘noise’ in marketing, particularly digital, is a real issue. There are a lot of businesses saying the same thing, and most of them don’t know what their message is, who needs to hear it and how to get it out. Begin from the top and work down. Take the time to study your analytics and data, interview customers, monitor and participate in social media conversations, and then develop content that connects your goals with the needs of your audience.
3. Research and discover your target customers
The vast majority of people make poor marketing decisions because they lack accurate information about their target audience. At Make it Clear, we’re specialists in creating and implementing audience personas to accurately identify our client’s target audience. As a result, better marketing decisions can be made, which can boost leads, sales and generate strong, long-term relationships between your audience and business.
You can learn more about why audience personas are so effective and how to create them for your business in our webinar.
4. Specify your essential marketing metrics
Establish two to four key metrics that will guide all of your marketing efforts. Without these benchmarks, the marketing team will have nothing to aim for, either individually or collectively. Unfortunately, many marketing teams do not get imaginative with the measures that serve as performance standards; their primary metrics typically concentrate around leads produced and sales. However, there are frequently more informative measures for determining the efficiency of your campaign. For example, setting goals for website and social media page visitors, impressions, traffic and conversions.
5. Prioritise content production
Create a dedicated team that focuses on the content supply chain, their focus should be planning, creating or locating and scheduling content. The team should regularly ask these questions:
- What are the marketing objectives?
- What content will achieve these objectives?
- Who creates the content, or where can we find the content?
- What format does the content take?
- Then, how can we collaborate with the relevant teams to deliver that content to the market?
6. Remain on brand
Ultimately the marketing team constructs the brand voice, applying it’s consistency across all initiatives and communication channels. At Make it Clear, we instruct our clients to implement a writing style guide. This typically contains information on editorial rules, grammar and punctuation conventions as well as the tone of voice and terminology.
Using an engaging and consistent writing style helps reinforce your brand and become easily recognisable to customers. Writing style guides often contain guidance on different communication types such as: presentations, reports, social media and email marketing, ensuring a common thread is used throughout. This is particularly important when your customer engages across various touchpoints.
7. Implement lean methodology to uncover campaign performance
Use the Lean technique (build, measure, learn). Essentially, during planning sessions, generate a list of hypotheses and order them based on projected impact. Then construct rudimentary methods for testing these hypotheses. This provides data-driven feedback in a swift manner, allowing your team to focus on the audience and prospects that really matter.
8. Experiment with new marketing techniques
Experimenting, testing, and measuring different approaches to see what works best is at the heart of great marketing. Your team should gather on a regular basis to brainstorm and come up with new concepts and objectives to implement and evaluate. It doesn’t matter how big or small, they must endeavour to try something new.
9. Build a long-term marketing plan
Set a complete twelve-month marketing strategy in stone, as well as goals for the next five years. Creating a strategy with specific, actionable items and establishing both short-term and long-term goals drives you and your team to execute the objectives.
10. Use clear calls to action
It may sound simple, tedious and downright obvious, but ensuring content has clear calls to action can be one of the most effective solutions to increase engagement and conversions. HubSpot saw a 1300 percent increase in CTR simply by adjusting their CTA buttons. Whether it’s signing up for your newsletter, connecting with you on social media, downloading your eBook, or making a purchase. Push users to do it.
To conclude
Whether you use any or all of these tips, keep in mind that marketing is a fluid field in which being agile is crucial for success. If you’re striving to be even more successful and profitable than you are now, you must be willing to grow to meet your audience’s evolving wants, requirements, and issues.
Have a call
We’d love to talk to you about how Make it Clear can support your organisation. Book a call here.