The Importance of Knowing Your Business Goals Before Starting Your Marketing Strategy

It sounds obvious doesn’t it? That a business should have established business goals in place before it even starts thinking about its marketing strategy, but you’d be surprised how often businesses do not clearly define and articulate what their business goals are and yet are prepared to start advertising and promoting their products and services.

Usually business goals are something along the lines of achieve X percentage growth in revenue, improve product Y to suit an evolving target market and increase profitability by Z per cent.

From these business goals and once an understanding of the market has been established, marketing objectives can be generated as part of the overall marketing strategy. For example, marketing objectives may be to increase revenue by introducing new products to the market, improve product Y by investing in product development and increase profitability by conducting regular price analysis to identify where price adjustments can be made.

But imagine a business that is looking to improve brand value for example, but it has a marketing plan that is focused purely on revenue growth. The expectations are out of alignment and although the various marketing activities already in place may well keep sales moving forward, they may not ultimately deliver on providing greater brand value, if it is not incorporated as a specific objective from the start.

The advantages of having clear business goals to your marketing strategy

By defining the business goals clearly and articulating them to the Marketers of the business, these Marketers can then formulate a marketing strategy and a set of marketing objectives that incorporates all of the relevant goals of a business. They can go out and gather the market information they need and conduct market research in a much more targeted way. From there it becomes easier to assess whether a current branding strategy still suits where a business is heading or if it needs to be reviewed and refreshed to help improve brand value.

There are many different types of advertising and promotional activities that could be drawn upon from traditional, digital or social media marketing, but when you are clear on what you are trying to achieve, it becomes easier to identify what will suit the target market and achieve the marketing objectives according to the nature and the scale of the goal.

When the advertising and promotional activities have been honed in upon to create a marketing activity plan, collectively the activities are more likely to be successful, plus deliver budget and time savings when the objectives are clear.

And when it comes to analysis, its much easier to understand if the promotional activities have been successful in achieving the marketing objectives and ultimately the business goals, when there is a complete and current set of goals to analyse against.

Final Thoughts

Although it is fundamentally a very important thing to do, setting business goals shouldn’t take long, but setting them and communicating them clearly to your Marketers, can save a company significant amounts of time and money down the track and position them well for success.

Which Digital Marketing Components Are Right For Your Business?

In today’s business world an online presence in some form is a must for most companies, but with so many digital marketing options and acronyms out there from SEO to SEM, PPC, SMM, CRM and CX, just to name a few, it can be hard to know where to start. That’s where it becomes important to assess which of the wide range of digital marketing components available align best to your organisational goals and marketing plan.

If your goals are to increase repeat purchase from existing customers then a customer relationship management (CRM) and e-mail marketing program that keeps your brand top of mind, updates clients on your latest innovations and cross-sells your products via your website, could be perfect.

Maybe you’re a B2B company that has traditionally relied on word of mouth, but would like greater control over your brand perception, rather than leaving it to others to describe. A well-designed website that reflects your brand 100% and provides a great user experience (that is reflective of the importance you put on your customer’s interaction with your company), can be a critical cornerstone to your online presence.

Or perhaps you’ve been online for some time and want to attract more of your target market to your website, as you know that this can directly increase sales. A content marketing plan that uses YouTube, a blog, Facebook and Instagram to inform, assist and entertain your potential customers (not to mention increase your SEO) could work wonders. As could implementing some search engine marketing (SEM) such as Google Ads or some pay per click (PPC) online display advertising.

An example from a digital marketing plan recently created

Below is an example of the components used in a digital marketing strategy that was recently created (along with a content marketing plan) for a B2B client who knew they needed a website to establish their brand presence online, but weren’t sure which other digital elements they should be utilising once their site was launched. They also wanted to know which promotional methods would drive the right type of traffic to their site.

Maximising your CRM program

Having a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program that captures your customers’ or potential customers’ details and using email marketing to communicate with them is well known to be one of the best marketing activities a business can do in terms of driving incremental revenue and ROI.

Sometimes however, businesses capture this data and send out the odd sporadic email here and there without really driving the program to maximise the results. What do I mean by driving it? I mean having a strategic plan on what the company is trying to achieve, how the company is going to utilise the data, how customer acquisition is going to happen, how customer retention is going to happen, putting the plan into action and then analysing the data, not just on a surface level, but getting in deep into the metrics to really build a wealth of knowledge of what is working and why.

Examples of ways to drive a CRM program

Some of the ways this can be done include selecting CRM software that is fit for purpose, creating newsletter/brochure sign-ups, online membership sign-up forms, investing in partnerships with complementary products, creating lookalike audiences, segmenting the data, developing a series of nurturing emails, cross-selling emails, online feedback forms etc. etc.

CRM and Content Marketing

Once there is a strategic plan of how the CRM program is going to be driven it can also be helpful to develop a complementary content marketing plan and calendar that describes what will be communicated to customers and when. The plan may include inspirational brand images or videos, the latest news on product developments, engaging customers by requesting feedback to better meet their needs or by providing them with exclusive offers tailored specifically to them. Then a content calendar outlines when this content is suitable to roll out, it may tie in with a product launch, seasons, holidays etc. Of course, things can and often do change throughout a year so its important to remain flexible and re-assess the timing of each content piece to ensure it is still relevant before it is sent out.

It is also important to remember that all of these interactions with your customers form key steps in the customer’s journey and their overall experience with your company. So it is important that they are aligned with your brand and reinforce the type of experience you want them to have along the way. If you charge a premium for your products or services a cheap looking email with garish starbursts offering ridiculous discounts, won’t align well. Whereas quality imagery, well written text and a compelling call to action will present your brand and offering in a much better light.

Final Thoughts

Having a CRM and pushing out the odd email to your customers is unlikely to realise the full benefits that a CRM program can deliver to your business. Having a strategy, the right software, a content marketing plan and calendar plus the ability to analyse data regularly, can help to truly maximise your investment in CRM.

Using Integrated Advertising Campaigns to Increase Sales

So you’ve invested in establishing your brand presence, you’ve got a lot of inventory to move and sales, well sales could be better. Could investing in an integrated advertising campaign be the answer?

Yes, yes it could! From experience we have seen the right mix of advertising mediums used with the right message and with an appropriate budget, deliver a significant return on investment time and time again.

Why an Integrated Campaign?

Integrated advertising campaigns that combine various mediums and deliver campaign messages consistently across those mediums, tend to have more impact, higher response rates and generate more leads than a single ad through one medium. Repetition of your campaign message through a range of media provides a more holistic approach and raises stronger awareness of the campaign overall. It also gives potential customers their choice of which medium to respond to you through, whether it be via the phone number shown on a traditional ad, a click through to your website from a banner ad or via social media to find out more about you.

Where to Start With Your Integrated Advertising Campaign

Beginning with a clear objective of what your sales target is to inform the scale of your campaign is a good place to start. Some integrated campaigns just focus on raising brand awareness to generate sales, while others combine a brand message with a strong retail offer. If you go with a retail offer be aware that too much discount can obviously eat into your profit, but if you give too little the response from your potential customers just won’t be there. And if you make an offer too complicated or convoluted then it is likely to be difficult to elicit a response at all. Of course, the creative execution needs to be aligned to your brand, but also enticing and eye-catching enough to get a response.

The types of advertising mediums to choose from today is vast, from traditional (TV, Out of home, radio, print) to digital (email, search engine marketing, digital display ads, videos, remarketing) and of course social media (Facebook ads, Instagram) etc. But how do you choose which ones? Well there are proprietary research tools out there that can help based on who your target market is. They can tell you which type of media your customers consume the most and this can help take some of the guess work out. From there, combined with what you know about your own business, from your marketing analytics and your customers’ journey for example, can help to narrow down what is likely to work well.

Final Thoughts

When you are developing your campaign it’s important to think about which metrics you will need to measure the results of the campaign and ensure that they are set up before it goes live. Monitoring these metrics as the campaign is rolled out, means that you can tweak things as you go, reducing spending in one place and giving it a boost in another that may be performing better. A final analysis of how the campaign has performed through each medium is important to conduct as it will help with your overall marketing efforts and also to guide your next campaign.

Why Is Branding So Important?

For any company establishing your brand and brand positioning is very, very important. Identifying what is the customer benefit that your business provides, knowing your points of difference, identifying who your customers are and pinpointing the market your business operates within is key. Only once you know these things can you start to get creative with brand names and logos etc.

And once you have a brand, a logo and maybe a tag line pinned down, you may be forgiven for thinking that most of your branding work is done, but in today’s world it’s not, not by a long shot.

Your branding should purvey every aspect of your marketing, traditionally known as the 4 P’s of pricing, product, place and promotion. If one element of your brand positioning is around quality, then a bargain basement price is not going to ring true, similarly your brand being available for sale in the wrong channels (place) means you’ll stand out for the wrong reasons and be wasting your efforts.

A brand’s positioning should also permeate through all of your employee communications, your company values and every touch point your customer interacts with throughout the business.

It’s not enough to just define the look of your brand, traditionally documented in a style guide. These days your brand’s tone of voice is just as essential. With branded content being pushed out through multiple channels, social media in particular, if your tone of voice in your writing does not match up to your brand positioning it’s going to dilute your brand.

Defining your brand’s imagery style is also very important. Is it fun, is it serious, is it vibrant or demur? Defining these things consciously will make image selection so much easier and efficient when the image style has been determined. Over time your customers will identify an image as yours by its style even before they have fully absorbed the image itself.

Other elements of a brand strategy that can help to further round out a brand’s positioning is to identify the brand’s personality, the brand’s behaviours (what it does and doesn’t do) and defining the role a brand plays in someone’s life. Anything that helps a company, a marketing department, an ad agency or content producer to be ‘on brand’ is worth investing time in up front to create efficiencies down the track.

A brand strategy document recently completed for a client showed that they had three fundamental unique selling points included in their existing marketing material. By going through the exercise and developing a complete brand strategy, they were able to identify other unique aspects of their brand which helped to add depth and better position it for success in its emerging market place. Now with a well-rounded branding strategy they can go out to market with increased confidence that their communication pieces are going to hit the mark.