Answering ‘how much does a digital marketing agency cost’ is easy. However, if you’re thinking about marketing from the perspective of an expense on your budget line item, you’ve got the wrong perception about marketing.  

Marketing is an investment in the growth of your business, and the companies that are doing it right get a return on their investment. We’ve seen returns on our client’s investments from $9 for every dollar spent to even $30 dollars for every dollar spent. 

There is no guarantee on what your investment will return, but one thing is for sure, marketing works when it is done consistently and based on a few fundamental principles. 

It’s not a cost or expense, it’s an Investment, and you should expect a return.  

Think about it. How many ads have you seen today just driving around in your car? Or how many ads have you skipped jumping to the next video you want to watch on YouTube?  The fact is, companies (likely your competitors) are spending money on marketing. Why? Well, they are probably getting a return and growing their business. 

Often a prospective client will come to us and say something like this, “We’re annoyed that we keep hearing our marketing is going well, but we don’t seem to see an end in sight for a return on investment. Unfortunately, our agency doesn’t seem to be able to answer that question.” 

If your agency can’t answer that question, you’re not working with the right agency.  Instead, you need to find a digital marketing agency that will work alongside you to help you understand what kind of investment you should make and what you might expect in return.  

According to the 2021 CMO Survey, marketing investments ranged from 5% to 12% of companies’ revenues. In addition, the survey asked the respondents when they are making a case, how often do the following behaviors occur? 40% of respondents answered that all the time, [the] marketing [team] builds a business case based on how marketing spending is aligned with business priorities.

Several years ago, the Harvard Business Review published an article titled The Ultimate Marketing Machine that stated,  “The leaders of high-performing companies connect marketing to the business strategy and to the rest of the organization; inspire their organizations by engaging all levels with the brand purpose; focus their people on a few key priorities; organize agile, cross-functional teams; and build the internal capabilities needed for success.”

Perhaps by now, we’ve helped you see that marketing is not a cost but an investment in your company’s growth.   

How much does a marketing plan cost?

Typically an integrated marketing communications plan will cost $35,000 to $50,000. It will start by aligning your marketing objectives with your company’s business goals.  It will also establish a baseline for your customers’ perceptions and include primary customer research to identify current versus baseline perceptions.  

The number of customers you interview, the type of research you conduct, and the number of competitors you review all factor into the cost range.  

Once you complete planning, you will have a strategy that aligns with your business goals, messaging that distinguishes your brand from competitors, and clarity on the best few initiatives likely to yield the highest return on your investment.  

Remember, marketing is part art and part science.  Most decisions that customers make are emotional, so it’s important not to completely emphasize science over art. 

How much does a digital marketing agency cost? 

If your marketing agency is doing an excellent job for you, they will pay for themselves. However, there is no one-size-fits-all for how much you can expect to invest with your digital marketing agency. It’s going to depend on the type of campaigns you’re running, such as video-based campaigns versus pay-per-click campaigns versus search engine optimization. 

Small to midsize firms will charge between $150 to $250 per hour based on the type of work they are performing, their proven experience and expertise, and the outcomes they will provide. 

The best thing you can do is ask your agency to provide you with a marketing campaign cost breakdown. They should show you how much each component of the campaign will cost and the expected outcome.  

Remember, no one has a magic 8-ball that can predict the future. However, you can create some models to serve as a baseline for measuring campaign performance. Then, as you gain insights and metrics through time, you can calibrate your campaign to improve performance. 

How do you create a digital marketing budget plan? 

Here are a few critical elements of your marketing plan budget.

1. First, identify whether you should invest closer to 5% or 12% of your revenues. Next, model out what your investment will look like and the return you need to make it worthwhile. Then share that information with your agency and ask them to develop a plan that is most likely to achieve your goals. A great agency will tell you if you don’t have enough to invest to achieve your goal. 
2. Don’t expect a guaranteed return. The only guaranteed returns are in CDs, and people rarely invest in them. 
3. Expect to do some customer research. Companies don’t talk to their customers enough. Your customers are referring you to their friends. Find out what they are saying and use it to grow your company. In-depth interviews are a great way to get insights into your customers and what motivates them.
4. Don’t skip your messaging strategy. Typically clients who work with us are worried that something is off with their messaging. The biggest letdown is spending too much money on paid advertising that doesn’t convert.  Messaging is a crucial part of your marketing plan budget. 

Do you want to discuss how much you should invest in marketing? Reach out to us at MediaFuel by filling out our contact form.

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Are you wondering if you should hire a marketing agency? The benefits of hiring a digital marketing agency are only applicable if you have a problem that digital marketing can solve and you believe marketing is an investment not an expense. 

What are common problems that digital marketing can solve? 

Here are few of the common challenges our clients face that you may or may not be experiencing.  The good news is if you’re experiencing them you’re not the only one.  

• You’re tired of losing to your competition.
• Your customers’ perceptions don’t reflect your culture.
• You’re not confident that your website is actually helping you achieve your goals. 
• You’re frustrated with the lack of return on investment (ROI) from your marketing efforts and uncertain you’ll ever see ROI. 
• Your video marketing does not reflect the quality of your products or services. 
• You’re disgusted that you’re losing sales due to inconsistent customer experiences across marketing channels. 
• Uncomfortable with the quality of content and design of your website. 
• You’re confused that you’re not attracting the right customers or employees to your business. 
• You’re irked that your reputation online does not reflect the actual experience of your customers. 
• You’re worried your prospects know your competitors’ names better than your name. 
• You’re not clear that you’re making the highest and best use of your marketing dollars. 

What is a digital agency? 

A digital agency is an advertising agency that has evolved to create experiences and promote brands through websites, video, voice search, google search, social media, interactive games, software, paid online advertising, search engine optimization and other digital channels. 

You might be wondering “what is a marketing agency” and “how is it different from a digital agency?” Nearly every marketing agency is a digital agency these days. There is not a difference. 

What does a marketing agency do? 

Marketing agencies help business leaders achieve growth by distinguishing their brand, driving brand awareness, generating leads, creating engaging customer experiences, promoting solutions and helping them solve problems and challenges their customers face. 

A digital marketing agency also does these things, but focuses primarily on digital channels to help you reach your customers. 

Our next two questions will help you answer why you should hire a marketing agency and give you a clue to the strengths of a digital marketing agency.

Should I hire a marketing agency? Yes, here’s why:

1. Great agencies will give your customers a seat at the table and help you align your organization around the customer. Your brand doesn’t belong to you. It exists in the minds of your customers. What your customers believe about your brand is true.  An agency will help you see your customers in a new light. 

Have you ever sat in a meeting with your executive team and someone says, what’s most important to our customers is “X.” Another executive chimes in and says no, what’s really important to our customers is “Y.” And the debate ensues.  The reality is that both are correct but they have a different view of the customer’s journey from their seat or point of view. 

2. You’ll get access to a team of experts that ensures you’re making the highest and best use of your budget.  An agency is going to have people that focus solely on search engine optimization, analytics and marketing technology, writers, designers, videographers, social media, brand/business strategists, media buyers, and market research. 

Together these experts will help you identify the best few initiatives that can yield the highest return on investment. 

3. You’ll stay on top of the latest trends and marketing technology. Marketing is in a constant state of change. Agencies that are focused on results will help you identify the best marketing technology stack as well as the latest trends to ensure you’re reaching your customers based on their point of need. 

4. You’ll tell better stories that resonate with your customers. An agency is full of great storytellers. To engage your customers and move them to action you have to tell great stories. Great agencies will help you see that your customers are the hero of your story and you are the guide that helps them achieve their goals. 

What to look for in a marketing agency? 

1. Culture, culture, culture.  The best marketing is a result of great collaboration between the client and the agency.  The client should act as a subject matter expert and the agency should take that subject matter expertise and turn it into compelling stories that move people to act.  If your cultures do not align it will impact the work you’re going to do together. 

2. A disciplined approach to marketing.  Marketing works best when it is done regularly and for enough time to measure the results. Typically there is never shortage of ideas for what we could do. Great ideas can come from anywhere.  A good agency will help you identify the best ideas and help you test them methodically for continuous improvement. 

3. Humility, Honesty and Courage. Marketing is an ongoing experiment. What works in one industry or in the same industry for different companies does not work exactly the same way. Industry experience is helpful, but it’s more helpful to have an agency that will admit they don’t know or aren’t sure.  They will tell you when they made a mistake. They will hold you accountable when you make a mistake. They will be courageous and try things that might fail. 

What are the disadvantages of hiring a digital marketing agency?

1. It’s going to feel like you have to get them up to speed on your business. If you own the business no one will ever know the ins and outs of your business the same way you do. No one knows why you started the business or the impact you hoped to make on your customers better than you. 

Initially the agency is going to need a bit more of your time, but as time goes on they will become more and more proficient in your business. 

2. You might wonder if they have capacity to handle your needs. Agencies manage multiple clients and are balancing multiple priorities. How can you be sure that you’ll get the right priority and what you need? A simple question to ask to address this issue is how many accounts your account executive will be handling. 

3. Return on Investment takes time. Your agency is going to charge you fees for the services it provides and you’ll also have to pay for media costs in addition to those fees. Let’s face it we’ve all become accustomed to instant gratification. Your agency should set clear expectations about when you can expect a return on investment. If they can’t clearly articulate when and what to expect, you might want to look for another agency. 

When considering if you should hire a marketing agency, the benefits should be weighed against the outcomes you’re hoping to achieve and whether they will extend and build upon your current success. A top digital marketing agency will provide you with straightforward answers to your questions and won’t make you feel like you’re being sold something you don’t need.

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There are different types of marketing campaigns to help companies get noticed and stand out.  Just like Forest Gump named a plethora of shrimp, we can also name quite a few marketing campaigns like brand awareness marketing campaigns, clever marketing campaigns, transparent marketing campaigns, direct response marketing campaigns, social media marketing campaigns, product launch marketing campaigns, and, well, you get the idea. 

There is no shortage of types of campaigns. 

So how many types of marketing campaigns are there?

HubSpot lists 11, another site list 14. It really doesn’t matter how many there are if you’re not sure how to implement them effectively unless, of course, you’re writing a term paper. Then how many campaigns there are might be necessary. 

What is a marketing campaign? 

A marketing campaign is an organized set of initiatives designed to achieve a specific goal that offers value for your business and your customers. 

General goals of marketing campaigns might include: 

• Raising brand awareness
• Improving customer perceptions 
• Changing customer beliefs 
• Launching a new product  
• Generating leads

What are the best types of marketing campaigns for my business? 

No one can answer that question until you sit down and talk to them about your goals and objectives. To identify which type of marketing is the best for your business, you have to start with your business objectives and then remember what you’re trying to achieve for your customers. 

More important than identifying the best type of campaign for your business is to identify the team or partner that will create, communicate and deliver the campaign. We make good marketing campaigns through a consistent and repeatable process that allows for unique inputs that distinguish the campaign’s output. 

In addition, if you’re hiring an agency to develop the marketing campaign, you want to consider their culture and how well it blends with your own. The best marketing campaigns are developed collaboratively, and therefore, you have to get a sense of what it will be like to work with an agency.  What do the agency’s team members make you think about the outcomes you’re trying to achieve? Are they challenging your assumptions and helping you make the best decisions? Are they committed to results and having honest discussions about what is working? Are they pushing you to be the best you can be and ensuring your prospects and customers will think so as well? 

Here’s an overview of the marketing strategy we implement for our clients and a complete guide to marketing strategy.

What are the three types of campaigns most commonly used in Business to Business (B2B) marketing?

1. Account-Based Marketing (ABM) – Businesses that provide services to other businesses such as consulting firms and SaaS (Software as a Service) companies often deploy this type of campaign. Typically sales and marketing teams are closely aligned to define targeted accounts that represent a good fit for your business and the highest potential revenue impact. You can identify a good fit and clients representing the best possible revenue impact by creating an ideal customer profile (ICP). ABM involves identifying key accounts for prospecting and the individuals responsible for purchasing. 

The campaign focuses on highly personalized messages to those individuals combined with personalized sales follow-up. Together the marketing and sales teams agree on the cadence and content included in the campaign while holding one another accountable through the implementation and delivery. 

The Terminus 2020 State of ABM reported “that 94.2% of respondents- currently say they’ve got an ABM program. Of those with an active ABM program, 7.9% were in an experimental pilot phase, and 43% rated their experience with ABM as “Early.”

If you’re considering an ABM campaign, you’re likely on the right track.

2. Pay-Per-Click Campaigns – Often, companies that offer products and services to other businesses will use pay-per-click advertising to generate leads for their business.  We’ve experienced that it’s useful for manufacturing suppliers that are critical businesses within the supply chain. The most common type of campaign is Google Ads, which allows you to bid on common keywords that your prospective customers search. 

Keyword research and a knowledge of what motivates your customers to buy are a couple of essential elements to create effective campaigns that drive demand for your products. You can quickly waste money with these campaigns, so it’s necessary to have someone familiar with the medium to help create and launch the campaign. You’ll want to look at click rates, your cost per click, and ultimately conversions from marketing qualified leads to closed-won deals. 

Another typical pay-per-click campaign for B2B marketing is LinkedIn advertising. We’ve found these campaigns to be effective when added alongside an ABM campaign, as you’re increasing the frequency of message in reaching your prospects. 

3. Inbound Marketing Campaigns – HubSpot, a marketing automation software company, made this term famous years ago. The idea is to create content that generates interest in your company. The essential element of inbound marketing is to have a thorough understanding of your prospective customers and the problems and challenges facing their business. You also want to tie your content into your search engine optimization efforts to ensure that you’re increasing your likelihood to appear in search results. 

Creating content and putting it on your website is not enough. You’re going to need to determine where your prospects get information and their media preferences. Once you combine these components, you’ll also want to consider an email marketing initiative that moves your prospects through your marketing funnel and on to sales opportunities. 

The initiatives listed above can be combined to create an overall demand generation marketing campaign that is highly measurable. With each of these campaigns, you will know what’s working and calibrate it to generate results. 

What are the types of marketing campaigns most likely to generate ROI? 

We’ve heard from clients more than a few times, “we wish we’d talked to you guys first.” But, unfortunately, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can be easy to waste money on marketing campaigns. 

If you’re just trying initiative after initiative and only looking at short-term, leading indicators, you’re likely to become frustrated and start to believe marketing is ineffective. 

Marketing is most effective when it is done consistently. Today, most executives want to go fast, and they say it without considering what it takes to go faster. Racecar drivers know that to go fast, everything around you and in you has to slow down. 

The most effective campaigns that generate ROI include the following elements: 

• Customer insights
• Competitor insights
• Cultural insights 
• Truth & Transparency 
• Customer Media Preferences 
• Agreement & Alignment on Measurement 

The truth is any type of marketing campaign can get you results if you take the time to do the work that makes the campaign memorable and actionable.

What are the most clever marketing campaigns of 2021? 

Who says these are the most clever marketing campaigns of 2021? We do. And here are three of our favorites. 

Subway: Fragrance with Tom Brady

It’s an epic release for the NFL season, which takes the viewer into a commercial that looks like it will be for a new fragrance that Tom Brady is promoting. Subway uses curiosity and humor to surprise the viewer and remind Subway fans of the bready aroma when entering the restaurant.  

It’s essentially a brand marketing campaign that connects football fans back to a great Sunday afternoon game day essential, Subway. 

A Fox Sports news article quoted the following. “The Subway Eat Fresh Refresh campaign brings to life how much new we have on our menu and is a significant moment in the brand’s transformation journey,” Subway chief marketing officer Carrie Walsh said in a statement. “We developed a creative idea with a supporting cast of the biggest names in sports to share all of the great changes happening at Subway in a story that continues across multiple spots and formats.”

Another brand marketing campaign we like is the new Caesars Sports Book Ad which ties in a promotional twist and could be considered a product launch campaign for its new app. It’s a transformational ad that reminds viewers to embrace their inner Caesar. The multi-million-dollar marketing campaign stars J.B. Smoove, an actor, and comedian. It also includes social media marketing initiatives to capture potential customers in the media they are using. 

A bonus social video marketing campaign that is one of our all-time favorites is the #IndyIsHappy campaign we produced.  Yes, full disclosure, we’re promoting one of our own produced commercials. It started just capturing scenes around Indianapolis of our iconic sports teams, restaurants, and venues. It was featured in the local news and has achieved more than 90,000 views since the original airing. 

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Vince Lombardi famously said, “winning is not a one-time thing. It’s an all-the-time thing.” The best marketing strategies of all time didn’t happen by magic, even though the output is often magical. 

The most effective marketing strategy starts with a compelling brand strategy and your prospects’ creative and media preferences. Ren Jones said, “marketing is like asking someone on a date, and your branding is what gets them to say yes.”

The best marketing strategies distinguish your brand from competitors and generate awareness or demand for your business. Marketing sells your business, and branding tells your customers who and what your products and services are at their core. Marketing moves your brand to your prospective customers, and your brand is where you take a stand. 

A good marketing strategy will take into account the media preferences of your prospects and even their creative inclinations. The best marketing strategies used by companies will include those elements above and identify the perceptions and beliefs you’re trying to change. 

The best marketing strategies of all time have three things in common.

1. You’ve got to stand for something, or you’ll fall for anything. Great brands take a stand. 
2. The medium and the message didn’t interrupt people. It encompassed the interests of the customers it was pursuing. 
3. They evoke an emotional response and make us feel something. 

So here are our top three successful best marketing strategies of all time.

Okay, it might be a stretch to call them the best of all time, but they are some of the best effective marketing examples.

#3 Mountain Dew / Doritos / Call of Duty 

Three strong brands united in this campaign to fuel the energy needed for extreme gaming. Mountain Dew, Doritos, and Call of Duty focused their marketing efforts to appeal to the heart of their passionate fans. 

Doritos used its packaging and a new flavor, Doritos Twisted Lime, to connect with Call of Duty fans and helped announce the launch of Call of Duty Black Ops. In addition, every bagged purchase provided Black Ops fans with experience points to help them level up in the game. 

Since then, the brands have continued the collaboration, boosting sales and driving loyalty. For example, Xtalks.com noted that Call of Duty: Warzone, released on March 10, 2020, had six million players on its first day of release. However, it grew to over 75 million players by the end of the first five months.

The substantial number of players represents a sizable audience for two brands that emphasize the extreme—another excellent example of a marketing strategy precisely delivered to an audience that likes to get jacked. 

#2 – Dollar Shave Club 

The business was sold to Unilever in 2016 for $1 Billion. Before it sold, the company created a series of videos that went viral, starring the company CEO, Michael Dubin. The first of the videos went viral in 2012. Dubin explains that he was looking for a fun, resonant way to connect with men who might buy his products.   

The brand took a stand against the big boys of shaving, including Shick and Gillet. It offered a superior shave for a fraction of the cost. At the time, it was original, creative, and cool. The brand resonated with a younger male audience looking for a better shave and open to a subscription model and ordering services online. YouTube was chosen as the medium of choice, and the campaign was launched right around South by Southwest, which attracts a younger audience looking for the latest and greatest in technology, art, and more.  

If you were to take the Dollar Shave brand away, you would get what you’ve always received. An inferior shave with expensive technology. Smart young guys deserved a better shave and would make the better choice. But, of course, the fact that Dubin took an improv class at Upright Citizens Brigade didn’t hurt either. 

His irreverent and humorous delivery seized the day and resonated with audiences around the world. Since its launch, the video has received more than 27 million views. 

#1 Dove Real Beauty 

Today Dove may alienate another following through its #ShowUs campaign, a crowdsource-driven partnership with Getty Images and Girlgaze to create the world’s most extensive photo library of non-binary individuals and women, according to PR Week.

Anyone raising daughters in today’s culture or even being a woman in today’s culture knows how tough it can be to have a positive image. Yet, women and men are co-equals in this world and can achieve most of their aspirations with hard work and effort. 

When the brand campaign was initially launched, it was hailed as a breakthrough for a woman’s image, helping each woman embrace her body type and break through the stereotypical models standard in beauty product promotional advertising. It helped us see the real beauty of the women we call mom, sister, daughter, wife, or girl-friend. 

It clearly distinguished the Dove product brand for women apart from competitors. The brand took a stand, and it took some criticism. The campaign created by Edleman and Unilever was multifaceted and used several impression points, including a research study about body image. It helped increase sales from 2.4 billion to 4.5 billion in ten years, further evidence that a clear brand strategy is vital to an overall marketing strategy. While on its surface, the campaign seems to be one of those unique marketing strategies examples, it has also faced some criticism in its most recent campaign iterations. 

In 2017 the real beauty campaign showed a spot that started with a black woman then transitioned to a white woman and then to an Asian woman. The ad showed the women transitioning using white soap, and some prospective customers claimed the ad was racist. Perhaps the brand could have been a bit more sensitive to the culture and doing more to show equality rather than going down the slippery slope. 

Rather than embracing consumer concerns, Dove said it didn’t do anything wrong.  Taking a stand as a brand is essential. Today we’ve lost the ability to disagree on different issues. Although the ad’s intent may not have been racist, people interpreted it that way, and the brand stood for real beauty and stood behind the ads. 

The brand took its eye off its primary audience, women, and positioned itself to chase the almighty dollar. But, on the other hand, the brand took a stand for young girls with its reverse-selfie campaign. As a father of two daughters, I hope the brand helps girls be girls and women celebrate being women. Our god-given gender does matter.  

Great brands aren’t going to make everyone happy. However, these few successful marketing strategies examples provide evidence that there are common elements that drive growth. They also show us great 4Ps of marketing examples. How?

1. Dollar Shave Club focused on delivering a better product at a better price. 
2. Doritos, Mountain Dew, and Call of Duty used a common gather virtual place, multiplayer online gaming, to create a synergistic brand activation campaign. 
3. Dove promoted natural beauty, bringing us all back to the essence of God-given, beautifully diverse women.

And there’s another reason why these are some of the best marketing strategies of all time.

The post What’s Common About the Best Marketing Strategies of All Time? And a few of our favorites. appeared first on MediaFuel.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “Plans are nothing but planning is everything.” He could have just as easily said, “marketing strategy is nothing but the importance of marketing strategy planning is everything.”  

Great marketers know that marketing works when it is done consistently. Of course, the same marketing strategy does not always equal the same outcome or results for one company versus another. Still, the planning benefits of marketing strategy far outweigh not having one at all. 

In an earlier post, we answered the question, “what is a marketing strategy?”, and we reviewed the seven elements of a marketing strategy. Now, we will unpack the importance of a marketing strategy and the purpose of a marketing strategy. Then, we’ll answer four more questions to help small business owners understand the importance of marketing strategy. 

1. What is the purpose of a marketing strategy?

Your marketing strategy should distinguish your business in the mind of your prospects and customers, and build comfort and confidence in the attributes that motivate their decision to purchase your products or services. 

A great marketing strategy will include brand messaging, competitive positioning, and the initiatives that will work together to reach your customers with enough frequency to move them to act. 

2. What is a good marketing strategy? Or better yet, what distinguishes a great marketing strategy from a good marketing strategy? 

A good marketing strategy starts with your customers’ perceptions. Your customers buy your services or products because they have a current problem they need to solve, a pleasure to fulfill, or a future pain they want to avoid. However, a great marketing strategy goes one step further and dives into your customers’ beliefs about your products and services, your competitors, and the status quo. It also identifies the perceptions you want to create and the beliefs you have to change.  

When you’re thinking about the problems you solve, you have to think about them from your customers’ perspective. For example, you probably don’t have the following issues, but at MediaFuel, we help clients who are often dealing with these types of problems. 

• They’re afraid they won’t ever see a path to marketing ROI (Return on Investment), and they’re not sure their agency cares about it.
• They’re confused about what’s working with their marketing and don’t know how to measure it.
• They know marketing works, but they are uncomfortable that they are creating the correct perceptions in the minds of their prospects. 
• They are frustrated with the quality of the content currently being produced and don’t feel confident that it will improve perceptions.

These are just a few of the comments that we hear from clients who are considering our agency. Your marketing strategy will help you identify the problems you often help your clients solve, but from their perspective. One of the benefits of a marketing strategy is it creates a position your customer can easily understand. 

Another element that distinguishes a great marketing strategy from a good marketing strategy is that it is based on the media preferences of your prospective customers. For example, some customers like to watch videos, others like to scan a blog or attend a webinar, and some like to read a thought leadership article or eBook.  Understanding your customers’ media preferences will help you communicate the way they want to communicate. 

3. What is the importance of marketing strategy in business?

It’s essential to have a marketing strategy in business. There is no shortage of ideas for most business owners, entrepreneurs, and marketing teams to help the company grow.  

A marketing strategy will help you identify and select the best few marketing ideas that are likely to achieve the highest results. As we said earlier, the best way to win in marketing is to do it consistently. A marketing strategy creates a reliable roadmap that you can constantly check to ensure that you’re creating the correct perceptions among your customers and positively improving their value perceptions with your products and services. 

Plus, when things don’t go according to plan, which will inevitably happen, you’ll be better prepared to calibrate your marketing efforts and ensure that you’re achieving the intended objectives and goals. 

You’ll also reduce waste and eliminate the “try this, no, now try that mentality.”

4. What if your CEO says, “the marketing strategy planning process will take too long; we just need to get to tactics?” 

Everyone wants to go faster. The problem is that we have to go through time. The best race car drivers, the ones that go the fastest, will tell you that to go faster, you have to slow down. Planning your marketing strategy should take about nine to twelve weeks and include the following elements. 

1. Identify and inventory the business goals and objectives the marketing strategy will achieve. 
2. A working session with your executive team to identify and inventory customer perceptions and beliefs. 
3. A competitive audit to identify the positions your competitors are trying to own in the mind of your customers. 
4. Qualitative in-depth customer interviews to identify and inventory the perceptions that motivate purchase decisions. 
5. Data modeling to explicitly identify the perceptions that are the most motivating. 
6. Search engine keyword research to identify the organic search terms and questions your prospective customers are asking. 
7. Synthesize the first four steps into a solid messaging strategy. 
8. Develop an initiative calendar to identify the content, channels, and media you will use to deliver your brand message to your prospects.
9. Launch, measure, and calibrate your initiatives to improve continuously.

Far too often, small businesses skip the marketing strategy process and focus on initiatives, and far too often, they end up wasting time and money.  

The planning process will help eliminate waste and help you get to your business objectives faster than you expected.  

5. What are the advantages of a marketing strategy? 

• Reduces waste
• Improves customer perceptions
• Improves conversion rates
• Identifies the best few initiatives that yield the highest return
• Allows you to course-correct more effectively and efficiently
• Provides measurable results 
• Remove the guesswork from marketing
• Contributes to consistent, reliable, and measurable growth
• Empowers your creative team members to do their best work
• Enables you to crush your competition

6. What are 10 advantages of marketing? 

1. Every time your prospects see your brand, it creates compound interest
2. People trust the brands they are familiar with
3. It generates awareness for your brand
4. It generates leads for your business and sales teams
5. It helps you own a position in the mind of your customers
6. It distinguishes your brand from competitors 
7. It propels the growth of your organization 
8. It clearly articulates your culture to prospective employees
9. It helps your company stand out 
10. It generates more revenue than it costs

Isn’t it time you stopped talking about going faster and started planning your marketing strategy so you can finally run at the pace your business needs? Knowing the importance of marketing strategy and taking time to plan is the key to unlocking the growth potential in your business. 

The post 6 Questions & Answers to Help Business Owners Understand the Importance of Marketing Strategy appeared first on MediaFuel.

Before we jump to marketing strategy examples, we should first define what we mean by marketing strategy.  

What is a marketing strategy? 

A marketing strategy is a specific plan and its initiatives designed to own a position in the mind of your customers and achieve your organization’s objectives. 

What are the 7 elements of a marketing strategy?

• Identifying your business objectives and desired outcomes
• Identifying and quantifying the perceptions that motivate buying behavior
• Evaluating and quantifying the perceptions your competitors are creating in the mind of your customers
• Assessing how your customers use search engines to find your products and services
• Synthesizing your findings into a distinguished brand message
• Launching initiatives designed to improve perceptions and generate awareness and demand
• Measuring the effectiveness of your initiatives and calibrating to enhance results

Learn more about the elements of a marketing strategy. 

What are some examples of marketing strategies to successfully achieve your goals? 

Consumer: New Product Marketing – Push and Pull Strategies

Thursday Pools, a fiberglass pool manufacturer, has a reputation for helping make pool installation easier to ensure a high-quality finish for its customers. Market research identified that pool builders were having some difficulties getting the best fit using traditional skimmers, which did not account for the 7-degree angle of a fiberglass pool wall. 

Sometimes the best marketing strategies used by companies are through collaboration with product development. For example, Thursday Pools product team saw an opportunity to make installers’ lives easier by introducing the Lucky 7 Skimmer, which accounted for the 7-degree angle of a fiberglass pool and made installation easier.  

Innovation didn’t stop there. After a successful launch of the Lucky 7 Skimmer, the Thursday Pools’ product team identified an opportunity to meet a consumer need and once again improve the installation process for dealers.  The Double-07 Skimmer replaces the rectangular face of the skimmer with a rounded look making it easier to match with other circular aspects of the pools, such as lighting making it a winner for homeowners. 

In this case, the marketing team used both push and pull marketing strategies to launch the products.  

What is a Push Marketing strategy?

A push marketing strategy is designed to get the product as close as possible to a customer making a decision. 

What is a Pull Marketing strategy?

A pull marketing strategy is designed to increase demand for a product or service. 

Thursday Pools used push marketing to take the products directly to the dealers that were installing the products. The initiatives used in the strategy included tradeshow displays, videos, and hands-on demonstrations. In addition, a pull marketing strategy was deployed via email marketing, social media, direct marketing, and public relations to generate awareness and demand among homeowners. 

Consumer: National Brand Strategy: Tom’s  – One for One 

TOM’s shoes was founded in May of 2006 by Blake Mycoskie. While traveling through Argentina, Blake saw the hardships of young kids who had no shoes.  It led him to create a for-profit business based on giving.  

The model is now known as a one-for-one model, whereby for every one pair of shoes purchased, the company gives away a pair of shoes to someone in need. Blake created a national brand that aligned with a core value of his customers to give to those in need. 

TOM’s shoes infused its brand story into its marketing strategy and created a tribe of people with a purpose driven mission, to help put shoes on the feet of people less fortunate. 

Consumer: White-label marketing strategy

Another marketing strategy is for a manufacturer to offer what is typically produced as a name brand product and offer it as a white label produce. For example Great Value peanut butter which is the Wal-Mart store brand is actually made by Peter Pan peanut butter. Trader Joe’s Millville cereals are made by General Mills. Costco’s store brand Kirkland batteries are manufactured by Duracell. 

Business-to-Business (B2B) Account-Based Marketing Strategy 

B2B marketing strategy is often driven around the relative market.  For example one strategy focuses on acquiring key accounts within a given vertical market.  Software as a Service (Saas) organizations offer some unique marketing strategy examples in that they are often focused on delivering their software to a specific vertical and then working to penetrate the market more deeply.  

The strategy often starts by identifying a few key accounts and then targeting those accounts through what is now commonly known as an account-based marketing. To implement an account-based strategy, marketers will go deep within one particular company to understand the decision makers as well as how the organization operates.  Very focused campaigns will be created to reach key decision makers in the organization in a period of 30 days with at least 10 to 16 communication touches to generate interest. 

Once a SaaS company has converted it’s prospective key accounts into customers the marketing team will then focus its efforts on opening up opportunities within that vertical segment. This can be done buy industry sectors or geographic regions. 

So, we’ve covered a few marketing strategy examples, but you might be wondering, “What is a good marketing strategy? Or better yet what distinguishes a great marketing strategy from the good?”

A good marketing strategy is based on understanding your customers perceptions, media preferences and being what they are already interested in related to the culture. 

A great marketing strategy takes it’s cues from your best customer and includes the elements of a good marketing strategy, but dives deeper into the underlying beliefs that you have to change to get your customers to choose your products or services over your competitors. 

An experienced digital marketing agency will ensure that your marketing strategy is tailored to get you business results. 

The post 4 Marketing Strategy Examples that Drive Growth appeared first on MediaFuel.

Sirius Decisions says that 67% of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally.  That means if you’re a B2B business owner or CEO, your prospects are searching out answers to their questions.  If your B2B digital marketing strategies don’t answer your prospects’ questions, you are likely losing opportunities and business to your competitors.

Leaders of the best business-to-business (B2B) companies experiencing growth know that B2B digital marketing is a critical element of their success.

What is B2B marketing?

The most common definition of B2B marketing is marketing geared toward a business or organization.  The problem with that definition is companies don’t make decisions, and they don’t respond to great marketing. People do. Even in B2B marketing, you must remember that while your solutions or products might help solve business problems, it’s still people that buy from you.  A better definition of B2B marketing is marketing geared toward decision-makers (people) trying to solve problems in their business.

Think about your favorite ad for a moment. One that you’ve said to your wife, kids, or friends, “I love this commercial. It’s hilarious.” Did you suddenly become a different person when you walked into your office? No. Then why do so many business owners think people lose the ability to feel and connect emotionally in the B2B world?

Even when we are working on B2B marketing campaigns, we cannot forget that we are talking to people just like us and guess what – buying decisions are emotional. Your customers rationalize them and intellectualize decisions, but they make an emotional decision when choosing you over your competitors.

What are the four types of B2B markets?

At MediaFuel, we’ve worked with four types of B2B markets, including:

• Manufacturers providing products to support other businesses. Examples of companies in this market include: pool manufacturers, tool and die makers, industrial freezers and HVAC producers, steel manufacturers, or original equipment manufacturer suppliers.
•  Software as a Service (SaaS) companies provide software through the cloud for a monthly fee. Typically, these businesses provide critical infrastructure in the form of software that helps make other companies successful.
• Professional Service Providers / Resellers often provide consultative services such as I.T., legal support, marketing strategy, and sometimes resell software or hardware to support other businesses.  Not all professional service providers are resellers, and not all resellers are professional service providers.
•  Not-for-profits typically have more than one key stakeholder to consider, including sponsors, donors, volunteers, and beneficiaries that the organization serves. In these cases, you have to consider each of the prospects and ensure you are using a combination of b2b digital marketing and sales strategies to grow the organization.

What are some common issues C-Level executives and business owners express about B2B marketing?

Evaluating the type of B2B marketing strategies that will yield the highest results can be a bit tricky. Unfortunately, this can lead C-level executives or business owners of B2B companies to think that B2B digital marketing isn’t right for them.  These statements probably don’t sound like you, but here are a few things we hear from clients that we’ve helped create successful B2B marketing.  

•  “I’m worried I’m never going to see a path to return on investment.”
•  “I am confused whether our marketing efforts are working. Our agency says they are, but we can’t tie the efforts to sales. I just don’t know if we’re wasting time and money.”
•  “We’re uncertain we’re creating the right perceptions with our prospects. We’re not getting the right kind of customers.”
•   “We’re frustrated that our prospects can name our competitors but don’t seem to know about us.”
•  “We’re discouraged with the content that is being produced to attract new customers. It doesn’t seem to move them to act.” 

Like I said these statements probably don’t pertain to you, but if they do, you’re not alone. The good news is each of them can be overcome with the right B2B digital marketing strategy. Strategy is all about making a series of choices.  The first choice you must make is being determined to know your prospective customers and why they buy your products, services or support your organization’s cause. Know yourself, know your customers, and know the position your competitors are trying to own in the mind of your customers.

What are some innovative B2B marketing strategies that can help you distinguish your business or organization from competitors?

Years ago, Marshall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message.”  Often business services and products are not uniquely distinguished, but instead, we distinguish them through communication. An innovative way to distinguish your organization is through live video broadcasts that deliver the quality of a major news broadcast or NFL pre-show or post-show game.  Virtual studios and sets using Unreal Engine and 3-D brainstorm are now accessible which can give you a leg up on your competitors using Zoom, WebEx, or another meeting tool to broadcast. 

We all know the best lead we can get is a referral from an existing customer.  Another innovative strategy for B2B marketers is to leverage what your current customers are saying about you and use it to get more customers like them.  We call it Prospect2Promoter marketing strategy. You can call it more qualified leads to help you grow your business. 

What are the best B2B digital marketing strategies in 2021?

If you haven’t realized it yet, you need to know that marketing works best when it is done consistently. The best marketing strategy is to have a strategy and not focus on tactics.  Yes, tactics are a part of the strategy, however you should not start there. The best B2B marketing strategies begin with your customers and what you know about them.  Do you understand their motivations for purchasing your products or services? What are your competitors trying to get customers to believe? Do you know their search habits? 

The most common question we get from business owners is what kind of return on investment can I expect?  With marketing, there is no one-size-fits-all guaranteed return. The only businesses getting guaranteed returns are lenders.  There is never a shortage of ideas for what can be done in marketing; the key is identifying the best few ideas that are most likely to yield the highest return. What you need is a disciplined, consistent, and reliable approach to B2B digital marketing to get results.

Some of the best strategies we’ve seen include a combination of search engine and paid outreach alongside a very targeted account-based marketing program. Each client is unique. There are distinguishing reasons your customers purchase your products or services. Your B2B marketing efforts should reflect those reasons. Build it around your existing customers, and you will attract more like them.

The post 5 things almost every successful business owner knows about B2B digital marketing. appeared first on MediaFuel.

What is brand awareness?

Has anyone ever asked you to hand them a tissue, or do they more commonly ask for Kleenex? How about a friend who says, “Google it?’ Really, has Google become a verb? It’s something you can do.

We’ve become so familiar with these two brands that we simply use them as common words without recognizing they are brand names.

Brand awareness is simply the level of familiarity people have with your brand.

Now you don’t necessarily want to become genericized as a brand like the examples above, but it does help to be well-known and perhaps famous.

Now you might be thinking, what is a brand, anyway? 

A brand is how people perceive your company in the marketplace. It defines what distinguishes you from competitors and creates a company’s perception in prospects and customers’ minds. It describes why your company does what it does, connects to people emotionally, and inspires action.

Why is brand awareness critical? 

One reason brand awareness marketing is essential is that it helps prospects distinguish one brand from another. A second reason is because it builds a prospect’s comfort and confidence in your brand.

Comfort and confidence are outcomes of familiarity and lead to trust.  The brands we trust become a part of who we are. They identify with us and typically align with our values. Brands say as much about a person as they do about the company that is creating them. You might have friends who only wear UNTUCKit shirts, Vans shoes, or Hurley t-Shirts.

We all buy things based on relative value, so retailers design shelf space to make shopping more convenient. Similar products are grouped into categories and sit on the same shelf space.  For example, you might see a jar of Paul Newman’s sitting next to a jar of Ragu.  A brand awareness campaign on Facebook promoting that 100% of the proceeds go to Paul Newman’s foundation might entice someone to choose Newmans over another brand.

Does brand awareness matter in business-to-business (B2B) marketing and sales? 

The short answer is yes. The habits we have as consumers influence buying behavior in B2B.

One could even argue that brand awareness is more critical than ever for B2B brand awareness marketing. Why?

The first reason is that nearly every company that sells in the B2B space is fighting commoditization. Before your sales reps even get on a phone, your prospects are already doing a ton of research online.  In essence, your prospects are busy trying to recreate the shelf space they see when making consumer purchases. Your prospects are comparing you and your competitors based on what they see online.

The second reason brand awareness marketing is essential is that every impression point with your brand has the opportunity to positively or negatively impact perceptions of your brand.  If your competitors are putting out negative information and not reinforcing their perceptions with brand awareness marketing, your brand perception is likely suffering.

Perceptions directly impact the value of your brand, and negative perceptions typically cause the most pain to revenue growth.

How do you increase brand awareness? 

There are several ways to increase brand awareness. For example, you might raise brand awareness through a social media campaign on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, Twitter, or Pinterest.  You might do it through pay-per-click advertising, optimizing the content on your website to increase your rank on search engines, traditional radio, television ads, Spotify sponsorships, out-of-home advertising, print magazines, newspapers, and tradeshows.

The trick is to choose the best few channels that will yield the highest return on your investments.

For more, here’s an overview of the marketing strategy we use and a complete guide.

What should you expect your return on investment to be for a brand awareness campaign? 

Brand awareness almost always works when it is done consistently through time.  Return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) can range from a three-to-one return on investment to a thirty-to-one return on investment. While ROAS is not the same as brand awareness, it can help you understand what you are getting for your investment.

The first thing you have to ask is, do you have the right mindset to invest in a brand awareness marketing strategy? If you’re looking at brand awareness as an expense, you’re starting in the wrong place. However, when done correctly, using the proper channels with the right messaging, brand awareness marketing will almost certainly get you a return, making it an investment.

Predicting your return is a costly process and typically unreliable. Still, working with the right marketing partner, you will know within three to six months whether your brand awareness efforts are making an impact.

What common problems can brand awareness help solve? 

This is not an exhaustive list of the problems brand awareness can solve, but they are three that should get you thinking more about how important it is to the success of your organization.

1. Charge a premium. You can charge a premium when your prospects are more familiar with your brand. Remember earlier, we said familiarity breeds comfort and confidence, which leads to trust. When your prospects trust you more, they are willing to pay more as they put a higher value on your brand. Brand awareness leads to improvements in your brand equity.
2. Stand out from competitors.  The perceptions of your prospects and customers are vital to your success as an organization. When you spend time and money on a brand awareness campaign, it should distinguish you from your competitors.  “15 minutes could save you…” How many of you finished that sentence? Did you recall Geico?  Some of you will get it right away. Geico has spent millions of dollars creating that perception, and you might even remember the Gecko that even delivers the message.  Insurance companies spend millions trying to separate themselves from competitors.
3. Get more of your best customers.  Creating good brand awareness can attract more customers like your best customers. People seek out friends that share common interests.  Your best customers are those that buy from you again and again and recommend you to their friends. Why not use what they are saying to attract more customers like them?

How do you measure brand awareness? 

You can measure brand awareness using qualitative and quantitative research methods.  An example of a qualitative approach would be a survey that asks customers to recall the companies they evaluated the last time they looked for a marketing automation solution or a reputation management solution.  If they recognize your brand, then you know you’re starting to build some awareness.

A qualitative approach is to look at your website traffic and see if there is a correlation between the number of site visitors before your brand awareness campaign and the number of visitors after your campaign.

Remember, measurements usually reflect a snapshot in time. Marketing and building awareness is a constant experiment in continuous improvement.  You should always draw some cues to understand the impact brand awareness marketing is having on your business.

The post 8 Questions to Ask Before Deploying a Brand Awareness Strategy appeared first on MediaFuel.

In these uncertain times, a good plan can mean the difference between survival and failure. President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is indispensable.” Marketing is often a leap into the unknown as it is part art and part science. With more than 25 years of experience creating marketing strategies for manufacturers with dealers, home-services companies, SaaS companies, and consumer brands, we’ve learned that things don’t always work out exactly the way that you’d expect. 

However, the process of planning helps you prepare for the unexpected that comes at any moment. A well thought out plan and disciplined marketing approach ensure that your business will not only survive but also thrive. Through the process of planning, you explore alternatives, gain insights into your prospective customers and what they are saying about your products or services. A great strategy makes it easier to adapt to things that don’t always go as we imagined. 

So, what are the essential elements of creating a marketing strategy?

Our Prospect2Promoter™ Marketing Communications Strategy is a proven process that consists of 9 essential elements or steps that ensures a winning strategy for small and medium sized businesses. 

1. Align Marketing Objectives to Your Business Objectives
2. Align Executives Around Customer Perceptions & Beliefs
3. Gain Insights into Customer Perceptions & Beliefs
4. Visualize Customer Perceptions to Make Better Decisions
5. Know Your Competitive Positioning 
6. Answer Your Prospective Customers’ Searches
7. Clarify and Distinguish Your Message
8. Identify “The Best Few” Initiatives
9. Measure Your Progress

Step 1: Align Marketing Objectives to Business Objectives

Marketing is an investment and produces a return. When we meet business owners, who are frustrated with their marketing efforts, they often have difficulty articulating what they were expecting to achieve. Aligning your marketing objectives to your business’ goals means looking at your sales targets and knowing how marketing will drive purchases. 

At this stage of the game, it’s all about the numbers and making data-based decisions regarding what you can expect from marketing efforts. Predicting the future is hard, so during this step, you’re not looking for perfection but instead creating a target. You must measure progress and make adjustments as you gain insights into what is working best to produce results. 

Step 2: Align Your Executive Team Around Customer Perceptions and Beliefs

Customer perceptions can be visualized in three dimensions: the importance of attributes that motivate customer purchase (vertical axis), a customer’s knowledge and experience (horizontal axis), and your customer’s comfort and confidence (size of the circle) that your business can deliver motivating attributes.

Small business executives often explore customer perceptions implicitly, but they fail to explicitly formalize the data into actionable insights that can guide marketing decisions.

Underlying beliefs cause a customer to do one of three things. 

• Choose your services or products.
• Choose a competitor’s services or products.
• Choose to do nothing.

Underlying beliefs might include, “product A is more effective than product B,” or “platform A delivers the outcomes our organization desires versus platform B.” 

Exploring the underlying beliefs is an effective way to gain insight into how you will communicate your value proposition to your prospects. 

Every team member will have a perspective about your customer perceptions and beliefs. Often they will be from different impression points. Alignment doesn’t mean 100% agreement or myopic thinking. Alignment means explicitly understanding that your customers are in control of information today.

Your entire leadership team must have an explicit understanding of customer value perceptions and the underlying beliefs that drive purchase behavior. Then, you need to use those insights to improve perceptions across the organization and throughout the customer’s experience. 

You can do this by putting yourself into your customer’s shoes. Ask your executive team the following questions. 

• What underlying beliefs cause a prospective customer to choose us over our competitors? 
• What underlying beliefs cause a prospective customer to choose a competitor over us?
• What underlying beliefs cause a prospective customer to do nothing? 

Once you’ve answered these questions, you can think about how your marketing communications can change those beliefs. Identifying and inventorying your team’s perceptions and beliefs about what motivates your customers to purchase is a crucial exercise during this step in the process. Your approximation of customer perceptions and beliefs can serve as a benchmark for your customer’s perceptions and help you understand how their perceptions change due to your marketing efforts. 

Step 3: Get Insight into Customer Perceptions & Beliefs

A simple premise serves as the foundation for the Prospect2Promoter™ Marketing Communication Strategy. 

Your best customers, those that recommend you, are a great source of information to grow the organization. If you can attract more customers like your best customers, you can increase the speed at which you grow. 

Qualitative in-depth-interviews are a great way to uncover the perceptions and beliefs that drive customer behavior. They are directionally correct and can shape and refine your marketing position and the specific initiatives you’ll deploy in your marketing plan. 

As we mentioned earlier in step two, we typically work with executive teams or business owners and key leaders to identify and inventory their thoughts about the perceptions and beliefs that motivate customers to purchase. Research allows us to see where actual customer perceptions and beliefs differ from your management team’s ideas. Together, step two and step three of creating this marketing strategy lay a strong foundation for clarifying your message in step seven. 

Step 4: Visualize Customer Perceptions to Make Better Decisions

Many small business owners are not aware of the data they can use to make better decisions to propel their growth. Often marketing teams look at leading indicators such as organic search results to the website, the number of website sessions, and social media engagement. These leading indicators are good to look at, but more importantly, you need to look at lead and lag indicators to get a clear picture of what is working in your marketing strategy. 

A former mentor, Wayne Bartel, said, “customer perceptions are the currency of the customer-centric organization.” Steps two and three of the Prospect2Promoter Marketing Communication Strategy involve identifying and inventorying the perceptions that motivate purchase. As we mentioned previously in step two, you can visualize customer perceptions in three dimensions.

The graphic below shows the value perceptions of a husband and wife deciding whether to purchase an SUV or Minivan. The yellow circles represent the attributes, which are the characteristics that motivate the decision to purchase.

Here the vertical axis shows that miles per gallon (MPG) is relatively more important than a leather interior or resale value. The higher an attribute is on the vertical axis, the more motivating (first dimension) it is in your customers’ minds. 

The horizontal axis represents the customer journey or how your customers get knowledge and experience (second dimension). Typically as a customer moves from consideration to evaluation and selection, different attributes become more important at each stage of their journey. 

Knowledge and experience lead to comfort and confidence (third dimension). As your customers get close to purchasing, they gain comfort and confidence that your products or services can meet their needs. The yellow circle’s size illustrates that our prospective customers of the Minivan or SUV are very comfortable. Each offers WIFI, towing capacity, color, seating for up to eight people, and safety. 

Resale value, miles per gallon, and leather interior are the deciding attributes at this stage of the buyer journey. Sensitive and thorough knowledge of how customer perceptions change through their journey leads to marketing initiatives specifically tailored to alter or reinforce those attributes at just the right time. 

When it comes down to it, marketing is about telling great stories. Creating a marketing strategy is all about crafting great stories that move people to action, and that starts with knowing how customer perceptions and beliefs change through time. Visualizing customer insights in this manner leads to more effective storytelling and a better customer experience. 

Step 5: Know Your Competitive Positioning 

A SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) is a great way to conduct competitive research. However, typically it does not encompass looking at how your competitors are communicating to prospective customers. Your competitors are trying to own a position in the mind of your customers. They emphasize specific attributes and sharing to get customers to believe that their product or service is the best choice. 

In our experience working with home service companies such as HVAC, Restoration, Construction, Landscaping, Pool Cover Maintenance/Repair, and Painting we’ve identified five common attributes that motivate customers to choose one company over another. 

Often your customers fail to choose the best service and instead choose the one that is easy to understand. A competitive audit that focuses on the position your competitors are trying to own in the mind of your customers is much more effective than a SWOT analysis. Both can be the one-two punch to distinguishing your brand.

Step 6: Answer Your Prospective Customers’ Searches

Your customers are searching on Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go, and other search engines to find answers to their questions. Search engine optimization is a critical aspect of creating a marketing strategy. It all starts with keyword research and involves technical elements such as schema markup to ensure that the search engines understand the questions you’re trying to answer with your website content and then align it to your prospective customers’ searches. Simplifying the issue, you need to make sure your content flows like a natural conversation, answering the questions your customers are asking based on the keywords they include in their search. 

We’ve optimized the content you’re reading now to focus on the keyword “creating a marketing strategy,” and it’s structured in a way that ensures it gets noticed by search engines. You want your answers to customers’ questions to show up on page one of search results. A page one search result can significantly increase traffic to your website, which gives you more opportunities to move customers from awareness to engagement with your brand.

We take a holistic approach to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Our team utilizes resources like Yoast SEO, SEMrush, and others to stay up to date on everything SEO as it’s in a constant state of change. 

A holistic approach to SEO incorporates some digital marketing best practices that include: 

• Keyword research – identify the words and queries used by your prospects.
• Good technical SEO – links that work and fast loading pages.
• User experience – giving the user access to the information that will move the user along the buying journey based on what they value most. 
• Quality and original content – answers questions our prospects and customers are asking.
• A solid social media strategy – helps to drive traffic to your site.
• Mobile optimization – Google puts this ahead of desktop optimization in their algorithm; even if your audience is searching more on desktop, mobile optimization is key to improving search engine page rankings. 
• Secure with HTTPS – this shows customers that your site is safe for them to use. 

Step 7: Clarify & Distinguish Your Message

In this step of creating your marketing strategy, you will synthesize your findings from steps two through six. It is a balance of art and science. At this point, you’ll have some factual science-based findings from your perception study, and you will have a clear view of your customer value perceptions and underlying beliefs. You’ll also have identified your competitor’s positioning and see opportunities where you can distinguish your brand. And finally, you’ll have a thorough understanding of the keywords that your customers are searching to find your brand, products, and services. 

A brand is a combination of emotional and rational elements. It’s important to remember that all purchase decisions are emotional. That is why fortune 500 and 100 companies spend significant dollars telling stories that make us laugh, tug at our heartstrings and compel us to take action. 

Your brand’s core consists of a distinguished and clarifying message. It is the essence of why you do what you do. Think of your brand’s position, which exists in your customers’ minds, as the soul or essence of why you do what you do. 

A strong messaging or positioning statement answers the following questions.

• What do you do? 
• Who do you do it for? 
• What does your customer get? 
• How does it change your customer’s status? 

The last two questions require a deeper dive that moves beyond features and benefits, focusing on your customer’s outcomes. 

Step 8: Identify “The Best Few” Initiatives

As business owners and executives, we all know that resources are limited. Most of us do more with less these days, and that is where you have to make hard choices. 

Another key to creating a marketing strategy is narrowing down your “best few” initiatives is not as easy as choosing the great over the mediocre. It typically means prioritizing great initiatives against one another and deciding to launch one while delaying the other. 

You’re not always going to get it right. As we stated earlier, the circumstances we find ourselves in and how things actually work versus how we think they will work are very different. Proper planning makes it easier to choose the right initiatives that are most likely to yield results. This also helps you adapt and respond quickly to address issues as they arise. 

When creating a marketing strategy for our clients, we typically plan three to six months of initiatives and cover many impression points (video, written content, downloadable content, social media, website updates, paid advertising, and many more) based on a prospective customer’s media preferences. We call this an initiatives calendar. Typically we’re making quarterly adjustments to the plan as we get insights into what is and isn’t working. 

Step 9: Measure Your Progress

There’s an adage to inspect what you expect. Believe it or not, many small business owners have a hard time knowing what marketing initiatives are working. Leading indicators such as website traffic, likes, and engagement are essential. However, you have to dive deeper and understand what lead sources are converting.

Don’t do it by asking your customers how they got to your website. Do it by implementing a marketing technology stack that allows you to see how your customers are behaving. It may sound expensive, but knowing what is working and how to do more of it is the fastest path to growth. 

This final step takes us back to where we started—aligning marketing objectives to business objectives. If you know where you’re trying to go, you can easily see the right path forward. 

Following these nine steps in developing your marketing strategy is a proven path to eliminating waste in your business and focusing on the things that drive growth.

The post 9 Essential Elements to Creating a Marketing Strategy appeared first on MediaFuel.

If you’re tired of wondering whether you’re wasting money on your marketing efforts or if you have a hard time understanding ROI, then you need to look at your marketing strategy and plan. Uh-oh, you say? If you don’t have a strategic marketing strategy, you need to read 5 Essential Elements of Digital Marketing That Get Results. It will help you get a clearer picture of what you need to include in a great plan.  

For the rest of you, remember that your plan is your promise. It’s the commitment you’re making to ensure that your organization grows. At MediaFuel, we’ve found that small businesses that have grown with strong visionary leaders are often missing the discipline and rigor that will get them to the next level. That is not a knock on a visionary leader. Without vision, people perish, but often visionary organizations without the discipline of execution don’t achieve their full potential. 

Think of a marketing strategy like a strong leader in the organization. Marketing always leads the way. A great strategy sets the vision for where you’re going, what you’re going to do, and even more importantly, what you will not do. 

Without a solid marketing strategy, your growth is at risk, and you’re likely experiencing one of these five mistakes. 

Mistake #1: The next big idea rules the day. 

There is never a shortage of ideas in marketing. Implementing marketing initiatives is like conducting a continuous experiment and improving the results through time. One of the most prominent issues entrepreneurs face is choosing the best ideas and focusing on only those. When you look at your marketing plan, do you see a clearly defined position you want to own in your prospects’ and customers’ minds? Does it identify the best few ideas you’re going to pursue in the next month, quarter, and year? 

Or does your organization operate with excitement toward the next new big idea that never gets fully implemented? We’ve seen this issue in SaaS organizations in their first three to five years of funding. It also shows up in businesses that provide homeowner services, such as restoration companies, moving companies, lawn care providers, and others.

Often, entrepreneurs and visionary leaders can sway the organization’s resources from one initiative to the next unintentionally. It’s only natural, as visionary leaders are never short on ideas. 

Mistake #2: You don’t know whose throat to choke, and maybe it’s yours. 

Leadership, as Jon Maxwell has said, “is all uphill.” But you need to keep climbing. If you have a solid marketing strategy in place, but you’re not sure about its implementation, then look in the mirror. The most common problem we see is that there is not one owner who is responsible for implementing the plan. In a small organization, business owners wear too many hats. Often, you’ll get stuck working in your business instead of on your business. Marketing is about working on the business, not in the business. To make the shift, you have to assign an owner of marketing in your business. This is someone who will implement the strategy and take ownership to ensure high performance. If that is you, ask yourself what you need to do to make time to plan the work and work the plan.

Also, you have to make sure that your marketing leader believes in the mission. A common issue with poorly executed plans is a lack of belief that the mission can succeed. Any doubt in the program will lead to poor performance and execution. It’s your job to ensure that your entire team believes in the mission even when it’s challenging. At the end of the day, if your marketing strategy is underperforming, then you have to look at yourself and make the decisions you might be putting off.  

Keep climbing, my friend. Leadership is all uphill. 

Mistake #3: Not establishing clear performance goals and return on investment metrics.

You can measure a ton in digital marketing, from organic website traffic to click-through rates on pay per click, all the way down to sales by lead source conversion. SaaS companies use sales by lead source conversion to optimize the best converting sources and do more of what is working. In the same way, home services organizations such as painting companies can do the same thing. 

You need to have at least three to five metrics, including those at the top of your sales funnel, the middle and bottom. Each of the stages can give you insights into the performance of your marketing efforts. 

Mistake #4: Not knowing who it’s for, what it’s for, why you’re doing it, and how you’ll measure it. 

Everything in marketing begins with a person. A person you call a customer or client. Elements of your marketing plan should clearly articulate who you are communicating to and what you want them to do as a result of seeing your video, ad, website, or social media post. An easy way B2B and SaaS companies do this is by clearly defining their ideal customer profile and then identifying the positions (job titles) in the organization responsible for making a purchase. This often leads to the development of a persona. See the example below. Consumer-facing organizations such as those that provide in-home services (painting, restoration, landscaping, lawn care, etc.) can also use personas.

A persona will help keep everyone on the same page. It will include a brief description of a “day in the life” of a customer, whether at work or home. It should also cover the pain-points that your service or product can resolve for the customer, the outcomes that they will receive, a brief list of the characteristics that motivate the decision to purchase, and the places your customer gets information. 

A persona can help make the creative process less subjective and help you remember that your customer matters most when it comes to great advertising.  

When you know who it is for, what it’s for, why you’re doing it, and how you’ll measure it, the initiatives you launch will be much more likely to succeed. 

Mistake #5: Forgetting that everything starts with Mobile Search. 

For seasoned marketers, this one is a no-brainer, but even those who’ve done it for years often need to be reminded of a truth more than the need to learn something new. One day, a good friend of mine left his phone in his car as we were walking into church. He started patting himself all over, trying to find his phone. Then he turned to me and said, “I have to go back and get my existence.” We laughed, but I thought about how profound the statement was for a moment. 

Your customers look for you first on a mobile device. Manufacturing companies such as steel manufacturers or tube forming systems manufacturers are exceptions to this truth. Still, for many businesses, the majority of search results come from a mobile device. The younger the audience, the more this is true.  

You must start with a mobile-first mentality. It’s not a new idea but one worth repeating. 

At MediaFuel, strategic planning is a core service offering. It’s at the heart of our Prospect2Promoter™ marketing framework. MediaFuel is a digital marketing agency in Fishers, Indiana, just north of Indianapolis. The team of experienced and passionate strategists and creatives works collaboratively to create search engine optimized and lead generation websites, branded marketing, video production, and overall digital marketing strategy that gets measurable results for their clients.

About the author

Chris Bass is the Chief Strategy Officer of MediaFuel Digital Marketing Agency and founder of PerceptionStrategy. He has more than 25 years of marketing experience and loves helping people be the best they can be.

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