Marketing, whether it's being done digitally or through any other medium, can quickly become overwhelming. The sheer volume of available avenues for communicating with customers is huge and gets even more complex if you add in all the possible variations of how to communicate with your audience.
In other words, effectively handling your own marketing in-house can quickly lead to burnout. It's no wonder that 54% or more of marketing team leaders claim to suffer strategy overload as their single biggest cause of frayed and delayed projects. This doesn't have to be the case.
The three most important rules for effective business marketing are: consistency, consistency and consistency. Delivering it becomes impossible if your marketing is all over the place and going nowhere. Instead, it has to be prioritized into a simple and actionable strategy that actually delivers returns without burying you in effort.
Here is how your company can pull this off.
Start with a 360° Sweep
Before you build up a clear strategy for prioritizing your marketing into a lean and effective plan, you'll need to put everything you already have on the table for a good look. This involves looking into your assets, existing marketing strategies, their effectiveness, analytics and the resources you have for pursuing new efforts or expanding current plans.
For a 360° sweep that's actually useful, you'll have to dig deep and be as honest as possible with how your company is doing. This means clarifying what it is that sets you apart from your serious competitors and what might be mediocre about either your message or your offer. Don't be squeamish about self-criticism or realistic analysis here. An honest review of what's working, what's stagnating and what's possible IS essential.
Brainstorm All Possibilities
Once a full sweep of your company's assets, current marketing success, offers and relevance to customers is clarified, you can start on a serious brainstorming session that gets creative. This is an opportunity for you and your team to put forth as many new ideas and practical inspirations from case studies as you like before whittling everything down.
Take advantage of your brainstorming session to explore where your largest possible customer base is and what the most effective ways of reaching out to them might be. This is where you can float ideas for Google ads, search engine optimization, social media marketing and everything else that comes to mind.
Clear Out The Garbage
Once you've brainstormed, you can now start whittling ideas down to those that are feasible and fit your vision best. This first means clearing out all of the obviously bad ideas and anything that you can't start soon.
As part of this paring-down process, keep data about your company resources firmly in mind to ensure that you're actually creating plausible goals and selecting equally plausible marketing strategies for those goals.
Build a Specific, High ROI, Lean Marketing Roadmap
With strategies and goals in place, you can now create a marketing roadmap that's simplified, immediately actionable and as likely as possible to deliver high returns without crushing your financial or human resources beyond capacity. While no roadmap can guarantee results, it should come close if the planning process and data leading up to it was carefully and creatively worked out.
Test and Test Again to Refine Your Roadmap
Implement your marketing roadmap of specific, simplified strategies and delegate different teams or individuals to monitor each. These strategies should be reviewed rigorously and regularly based on solid audience response data while also being applied with patience for delayed benefit (especially when it comes to organic, SEO and social media-based marketing).
One thing you should also firmly keep in mind is that every dollar and hour you spend on your marketing has to be about results. If the data from analytics for each part of your marketing roadmap doesn't eventually show useful returns on your efforts, then modify that segment of your marketing and test again. Keep doing this to refine your plan into its best and most efficient possible form.
Get Marketing Help That Really Helps
Even with a strong idea of what steps to take for a leaner, meaner marketing roadmap, the process of getting there can be fraught with difficulties and unexpected headaches. You can simplify it much further, and save an enormous amount of time by calling in expert external support from people with years of experience creating leaned-down business marketing success stories. Front Burner Marketing is ready to help with exactly this. Reach out to us today to learn more about our professional services.
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