The thought of expanding your marketing, and the impact that a successful campaign could have on your business, is undoubtedly exciting. So much so that many business owners jump right into starting new campaigns and the related assets (ads, imagery, video…).
But is that such a good idea?
If you move too quickly, you’ll find that, more often than not, you’ve started running in the wrong direction. That’s why it’s important to contain that burst of excitement and slow down.
Before developing a marketing plan, you need to establish the reasons behind expanding your marketing efforts and define the expected outcomes. Marketing serves many purposes these days. It’s not just around promoting your services to attract new clients. Additional considerations include:
Client retention
Understand this: competition is pounding on your clients’ doors. It’s your job to delight clients and make sure they have no reason to leave. You must continually remind customers of the exceptional service you provide, the added value you bring to the relationship and the innovations your company continually embraces. By doing this you:
Have clients become brand advocates and tell their network of the value you bring to their world—beyond the regular services or products you provide.
Increase your share of their wallet. They may be spending cash with another vendor who offers something, they believe, they can only get from that specific vendor. Perhaps you offer these services as well. By sharing your complete range of services with existing clients (who love you) you will get more business.
Reduce client churn. It costs a lot more to land a new client than it does to keep an existing one.
Attracting talent and recruiting
One of the limiting factors successful companies encounter is not having enough talent to meet client obligations. Just think of how much more work you could take on if you had the talent to deliver the work. By using your marketing to attract and retain talent, you:
Keep your current employees happy and engaged with the direction the company is headed. Your competition wants to poach your people. You cannot let that happen. Strategies need to be put in place to ensure your employees feel a part of the bigger picture and see themselves as contributors to the company’s success.
Attract other talent. Disengaged employees are always looking for greener pastures. Position yourself as a people-centric organization that rewards employees for their hard work. This is not about salary. There are so many other factors that provide employees with a sense of belonging, or worth.
New Business Development
Things are changing. Buyers, and those that influence the buying decision, are getting younger. The traditional business model is evolving. Things are going digital because this cohort are digital natives and consume their content and develop relationships in the digital realm. Companies that understand that will be ahead of those companies that are not willing to adapt to the new business paradigm. To successfully pivot to the digital age, the following things need to happen:
Ensure your company is seen as a thought leader and problem solver. Millennials are looking to change how business is done. They see traditional business models as dinosaurs. Millennials want to be change agents to achieve their success and have the ability to make this happen.
Play in their sandbox. Find where they are and connect with them on that platform.
Identify what makes you unique from your competitors. Focus your efforts on conveying this to your target market.
It is important to establish the goals of your marketing investments. With goals you can prepare the roadmap that gets you to your destination. Without goals, you have no metric by which to measure success and no destination to focus our efforts.
Final Thoughts
Before expanding your marketing efforts, you need to clarify what you want to accomplish. These should be high level ideas—not nitty gritty details. Once you have an answer to that question, do an audit of your current marketing activities. What are you currently doing, and how much did you spend on those activities? Understand which current initiatives you want to continue and where improvement is necessary. Once you understand those two aspects, then you can speed up and begin expanding your marketing efforts.
What you need to know before starting a Digital Marketing program
Learn how digital marketing aligns with the sales process, and how leads can be effectively converted to customers.
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