Building a Culture of Influence: Implementing Time –Tested Marketing Strategies In the “Here and Now”
To stay influential, you have to stay relevant. To stay relevant, you have to stay around. Marketing and branding are constantly evolving, and “adapt or die” rings just as true in this space as any. But with the craze of influencer marketing (which is good), hacking social media algorithms (also good), and forward-thinking focus meetings (again, good), we can’t lose sight of the key components that make the marketing machine keep turning.
In this blog, we’ll explore a few time-tested marketing strategies that will help you grow your brand to become more influential. Remember, even culture creators need to color inside the lines every now and again.
Identify Goals and Opportunities
Regardless of what strategies the marketing team of a brand uses - demand generation, digital, content, events, partnerships, etc. - having clearly defined and actionable strategies is universally important. But before you do this, there's some preparation you need to do so you can start creating your strategies, which starts first with identifying goals and opportunities. To help you do this, below are three questions you should ask at the outset of brand building:
Establish your team's vision. What is the overarching vision for the team?
Find your core competencies and market opportunities. What are the ways and places where marketing can help your company?
Identify the end-to-end customer journey. How can you connect with customers no matter what stage they're at?
If you understand your customers' needs, you'll be able to develop a strategy that will help you connect with them and achieve your main goal.
Create Marketing Strategies
It's now time to outline your strategies. Collaborate with your team to accomplish this. Hold brainstorming sessions, plan sessions, have casual discussions, and accept questions and feedback. Co-creating strategies make it easier to get buy-in.
When you develop your strategies, ensure they incorporate the following and ask the following questions:
Identify the target audience. Be as specific as possible. If your business targets prospects or current customers, your audience should match.
Set objectives and goals. What do you want to accomplish? Is your business growing? Would you like to drive more traffic, acquire more users, grow revenue, or manage some other aspect of your business?
Getting the message out. What are your preferred channels of communication? For effective marketing, you need to know where and how your target audience spends time, consumes content, and approaches marketing in order to effectively reach and influence them.
Metrics. Calculate the numbers that you need to hit to reach your business goals and evaluate the effectiveness of this strategy.
Cost and Budget. It’s always necessary to take into account all the costs associated with executing a task, whether they are monetary, resources, or time-related. This will ensure the result is greater than the cost to achieve it.
Timing. The right time to hit certain metrics and achieve important results is to define milestones for your team. Even if your plan is quarterly or yearly, defining milestones will give them a precise roadmap to work from.
When defining your strategies, determine the key metrics and results you aim to achieve, as well as obstacles that could affect success, then prioritize your strategies for impact and importance.
Break Down Strategies into Tactics
Assign a single owner to each program or project to guide its implementation. With all your strategies in one place, assign a point person to oversee each. They’ll work with the appropriate people to create the programs and projects that will help you meet your goals.
Programs and projects that produce good results have a single owner who drives forward the work and knows how to help a team thrive, a time-bound deadline, and measurable results that lead to the strategy's outcomes
The strategy should be listed under each program or project so the team knows how the work relates to each other. This ensures that everyone understands the reasoning behind their work and its impact of it.
Time to Execute
Any marketing expert worth their income knows that marketing strategies are fundamental to success, but that the fun part of doing business is executing these strategies. Now that you know how to operationalize your marketing strategies, you and your team can achieve the greatest results.
