It’s easy to be tricked into thinking that marketing is only a creative, artistic endeavor. Conversations around design and color schemes often camouflage other key parts of marketing, which is rooted in not only creative ideas, but also the data and metrics that help direct the path of artistry.
To keep it all in balance, it’s important that your marketing efforts be based on a solid strategy. Be sure to include the following elements for a perfect blend of art and science:
Brand Celebration
Start by doing a deep dive into your brand. Identify what makes you special and unique and think about how that influences how your brand looks, feels and sounds. Develop your look and your voice based on your brand values and be prepared to be unbending in your consistency around your brand identity.
Target Your Audiences
Determine who is most likely to spend money with your company and why. Develop some key pain points that your product or service addresses. Do research based on reliable data to learn more about your audience, learning more than just their age and gender. What do they do for a living? Where do they spend their time on the weekends? Are they pet-owners, and do they travel? Are they environmentally conscious, or is there a cause that they tend to gravitate around?
These questions help you better define and then segment your audience so that your messaging can be developed in different ways for different groups.
Develop Measurable Goals
Before creating content, you need to know what you’re trying to achieve. Are you interested in raising brand awareness, or in driving more organic traffic to your site? These two goals would trigger the development of very different content pieces, such as investing in more social media posts for brand awareness versus developing pieces to maximize search engine optimization to drive organic traffic.
Make sure your metrics make sense for the goals you are trying to reach. For instance, if you are attempting to increase interest in a particular product line, you would never plan to count Facebook likes as a way to determine if that product line is selling. Instead, you would measure how many people click through to the landing page after viewing a video of an unboxing of the product.
Personalized Content
Your videos, emails, blogs and infographics should never be designed to reach broad groups of people. For instance, if you have four sub-segments in your target audience, then you should be developing a separate piece of content for each of those segments. Otherwise, you’ll create a bland piece of content that isn’t particularly interesting to any of them.
Customer-Focused Content
This may sound similar to personalized content, but it’s a different concept. Too many companies get the personalization right, but their content consists of telling each group what’s so great about their product.
In order to successfully engage with your segments, you need to make your content all about them. That means talking about their challenges and issues and then providing value with solutions and insight. Even in cases where a lead isn’t ready to convert, you’ll be building your reputation as an expert in your industry.
Omnichannel Marketing
The more places you connect with potential customers, the more likely they are to engage with your brand. Instead of posting a video to your website and waiting for engagement, you’re much more likely to connect with members of your target audience if there’s an effort to distribute the video through a variety of channels, including social media and email marketing.
For information about initiating an automated, omnichannel marketing plan based on reliable data, contact us at DirectMail.io.
