By Ryan Hedspeth
In a rapidly evolving industry, marketers sometimes have a hard time remembering that while fun and exciting, the “shiny new thing” is never a silver bullet. Yes, QR codes, remarketing and Twitter are all interesting topics, but in and of themselves they’re not going to help us make our numbers next year.
We’re not here to backwards-engineer strategies from tactics. Strategic marketing requires us to develop resonant messages and useful content first. We then make it available to the market through multiple channels. This gives our most valuable target audiences the ability to interact with our offering on their own terms. This is how we become a useful part of their educational process, build trust, become a consideration in their purchase decision and eventually convert sales.
Regardless of how many years we’ve been in the business, none of us know exactly what messages, content, channels or tactics will work. Markets shift. The behavior of decision makers and influencers is dynamic. Blink and the competition has gained share.
What we can do is always start at the beginning – develop informed hypotheses by asking the right questions, assimilate what others are doing and saying about our industry, and eventually confirm or deny our assumptions through performance.
SQUARE ONE
As we approach the close of another year, we at Signal find ourselves querying executive teams about goals for 2012, asking product managers about innovation initiatives and coursing through online research. We’re implementing surveys and speaking with customers, non-customers, and media. It’s only once we have conducted some version of these exercises (see our scalable process illustrated below) that we are able to craft messaging and develop content that resonates with our customers.
Signal's three-step process to developing a strategic marketing plan.
NOW FOR THE FUN STUFF
It’s now time to develop a tactical plan informed by our strategy. And how will we deliver our messages and content in an effective way? Modern marketing communication programs are definitively web-centric because of the ease of web publishing and the ability to track the activity of users. This analytical ability is what allows us to test our hypotheses and optimize our marketing mixes, but getting relevant traffic to our websites is the trick.
Taking what we would typically consider a business-to-business strategy, designed to generate thought leadership and sales leads, let’s look at an integrated tactical model.
With the website in the middle to provide a platform for easy content publishing and analytics, we turn to the tactical drivers and channels that we consider in our marketing mix. There are an infinite number of ways in which these individual tactics might work together but the results of this process can be staggering:
Example #1
A B2B services organization needed a quick boost at year-end. It turned a $25,000 investment in content development, media relations and advertising into over $1M in potential contracts. This led to a decision to implement the company’s first-ever integrated marketing program.
Example #2
A premier travel and tourism destination needed to maintain rentals and sales in a 32%-down market. An integrated program including content development, web marketing, mobile marketing and social media provided a sales contract volume growth of over 100% from the previous year.
Example #3
A pharmaceutical services company needed to differentiate to survive in an overly commoditized market. By investing roughly $600K in a comprehensive rebranding, the company earned approximately $17M in projected revenue, directly attributable to leads and awareness programs.
While every organization is different, we all benefit from a systematic approach to uncovering and leveraging market opportunities. As we move into a new year, let’s not get dazzled by new, highly publicized tactics. Let’s challenge ourselves to start at square one. All tactics are worth considering but without a sound strategy, we have no basis from which we can form hypotheses or develop effective marketing mixes. We sometimes get lucky but more times than not, jumping to a tactical conclusion and then trying to backwards-engineer a strategy is nothing more than shooting in the dark.