PURPOSE

What does your company exist to achieve? Do your customers understand what you’re about? Who do you serve and therefore who are your audience? What would they say about your company? What makes your staff feel proud? What do they feel they are contributing towards?

POSITION

In which market do you operate and is it changing? How is it defined? How is your brand seen within the market? How do you compare to your competitors? How do you differentiate at brand/service/product level?

PROPOSITIONS

In the eyes of your prospective customer, is it clear what you are offering them? What value does your company/ product/service add? What problems do you solve for? Are you communicating how you will meet your prospects needs? Are you communicating how you’ve met the needs of similar customers?

TARGET AUDIENCE

All good marketing begins with an understanding of target audience. Where are they, and where do they hang out online? Are you making use of Personas? What are their interests and behaviours? Understanding your target audience will determine which channels and platforms to make use of. For example, targeting across social media platforms is becoming ever more sophisticated, and Content Marketing strategies only work if you understand what your target audience is searching for.

CAMPAIGN OBJECTIVES

Be specific in your campaign objectives and be clear on what success looks like. Brand building, lead generation, channel building, nurture… these are all types of campaign objective. It is your campaign objective which governs what tactics, platform, content type or ad type you might use, and dictates which metrics are used to measure success. For example when brand building you may be more interested in impressions and exposure, and for a lead-gen campaign you’ll be interested in capturing the details of prospective customers.

CONTENT CREATION

Once campaign objectives are set and the audience defined, it’s a lot easier to brief a creative team. You need to think in terms of MESSAGING. What are you trying to persuade your audience of? What are you trying to persuade them to do? The answers to these questions help the creative team write cut-through copy, deliver compelling design and produce engaging content - in all forms.

CHANNEL EXECUTION

You may have inspiring and engaging content, but campaign success is really governed by how well you execute across channels, whether they be social, email, display or search. Content should always be optimised for channel and campaigns only succeed when they deliver audience engagement and drive users to ‘act’.. to click, or register or give up data.. etc. Great marketers deliver engaging digital customer journeys designed to meet specific objectives.

MULTICHANNEL STRATEGY

In marketing, don’t confuse strategy with channels, platforms or tools. You may already use a mixture of email marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, SEM / PPC and event marketing. Chances are you also use a plethora of tools. However a good marketing strategy is one which underpins all of your marketing activity. Only then can you benefit from clear positioning and consistent branding, and deliver the channel-optimised content and customer journeys designed to meet your overall objectives.

MONITOR THE DATA

Marketing campaigns generate huge amounts of data. Today we measure everything:- impressions, views, conversions, CTR, CPC, CPV.. etc. Metrics differ depending on the nature of the platforms and channels you’re using. For example, you may be trying to drive traffic towards a landing page, and you’ll want to know what enticed the user to click through to it. Social media platforms offer their own analytics and provide comparable data to determine the success of ads. For Email you’ll be interested in open rates, read rates and clicks. Ultimately, knowing what performs makes your operations slicker and your marketing more efficient, thereby reducing the cost of customer acquisition.

Marketing today requires a combination of strategic thinking, well-defined objectives, clear brand purpose, persuasive content, and multichannel execution.