5 Steps To A Rock-Solid Marketing Strategy

Start with a strategy. Seriously, don’t send so much as a single tweet until you’ve mapped out your big-picture strategy for taking the market by storm. Marketing without strategy is like peanut butter without the jelly, Yin without the Yang, or Calvin without Hobbes. It may very well keep you busy, but you will likely find yourself spinning your wheels, frustrated, and achieving far less than you could otherwise.

Instead, take the time to dive deep and define a rock-solid marketing strategy for your business. After all, it’s with a potent strategy that truly amazing things begin to happen.

Case In Point…

Working with a leading B2B agency to revive their brand and advance their position in the market, we formulated an all-out rebranding strategy.

The results:

• Monthly unique website visitors increased 165% YoY
• Total website page views increased 384% YoY
• Blog page views increased 570% YoY
• Lead generation through website downloads totaled in the thousands vs. zero prior to the rebranding

How Did We Do It?

We started by completely rethinking our client’s marketing. Who were they – and what did they need to become in order to gain more market share? And then we figured out how they would win, ultimately outlining 127-pages of strategic rebranding and marketing recommendations.

Want similarly astronomical results? Follow these steps:

1. Reassess Your Brand

Who are you, and why? What do you stand for? What are your core values? If your answers are not clear and powerful, it’s time to rebrand. Dig deep, shed your outdated branding, and be honest. How do you make a difference in the world?

Be bold! Marketing strategy does not work in increments. It’s all or nothing, so go for it!

2. Rethink Your Audience

A company’s target audiences are often misunderstood, which naturally occurs over time, as the company gets larger, processes become ossified, and the firm relies more on the status quo to survive. Many companies simply identify their largest (or easiest!) customers as their “ideal” target audience. This is a reactive approach to thinking about audiences – and forgetting your “why.”

Instead, talk with and analyze your different audiences. Clarify your distinct value to each segment, and then proactively determine your priority audiences and your unique selling proposition for each.

3. Realign Your Goals

What are your must-win battles in the coming year? And where are you focusing most of your time? Are your goals aligned with your marketing calendar?

It’s always good to check in and make sure that your day-to-day actions are impacting your bottom line and driving the overall business towards the ultimate goal. Without a marketing strategy in place, it’s all too easy to lose focus.

4. Re-ignite the Customer Experience

Map all of your customer touchpoints throughout the funnel. Examine each one from your prospect’s perspective – is the experience all that it should be? Rethink the times and locations and methods of your connections. Work to improve each touchpoint. Make each one count.

When Glide dental floss entered the market, instead of turning to traditional marketing and advertising, its marketing team decided to send product samples to dentists around the country. This way, they were able to try it, love it and ultimately recommend it to their patients. With the support of this key audience, Glide is now the number one floss among dentists and number two in retail sales.

5. Track, Analyze & Repeat

Behind every great strategy, you’ll find a whole lot of data to back it up! More than industry best practices alone, tracking and analyzing your own campaigns is the best approach to validating your marketing. You need to test, test and test some more. It’s called data-driven decision-making, and it makes a world of difference in achieving your marketing goals.

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When talking about marketing strategy, we’re not focusing on stand-alone projects or one-off campaigns. A solid strategy is one that has the power to transform your brand. Creating a fresh strategy for our client, we were able to reveal the unseen essence of their brand and impact literally every piece of their marketing. We took a brand that was stale, tired and stagnant and brought it back to life, all while doubling their revenue and exceeding every one of their marketing goals.

Now how about you? Are you ready to rethink your marketing strategy and see mega results?