Don’t Build Your Marketing Plan on a Foundation of Sand

Photo by Anthony Choren on Unsplash

The 3 pillars of your go-to-market ecosystem should include brand, business, and marketing strategy.

Have you noticed how many marketing campaigns look the same and don’t differentiate the company? The products, images, videos, ads etc. all blend together. I think the reason for this lies in the absence of fully developed brand and business strategies–or rather, the integration of these strategies with marketing. 

My experience has shown me that this is a less than ideal approach to sustained growth for most startups, and it turns out a top marketing consultant, Tracy Van Hoven, with whom I worked at my former company and who has provided marketing leadership for many other top brands, agrees. What is the sign you’ve built your marketing plan on a foundation of sand rather than business and brand strategy?

“Everything tends to be . . . manic,” Tracy says. “There’s no prioritization, and there’s no alignment among department heads. Everyone is working off their own list of priorities. You look at your colleague and ask, ‘Why are you working on that? I thought the business plan named these three things as our top priorities?’”

The result will often be a tendency to end up “chasing your own tail” and wasting marketing dollars. 

So, what does a well-integrated company look like? Well, generally it hums along nicely and intentionally like a fine Swiss watch, with all the movements in sync and doing the most important things needed to operate with precision and consistency. But let’s drill down a little bit to see what the inner-workings look like. 

Business strategy: Your business strategy describes how you will win in the marketplace. It includes your mission, vision as well as your long term goals, the scope of your project and your competitive advantage. Business strategy also includes how you will allocate resources and use technology to enable your business to understand and reach customers in the most cost effective way.

“You’ve got to get tools in place to help you measure the results of everything you do, which is why martech is so important,” Tracy notes. “How your money is being spent, where you might shift it and so forth.”

Brand strategy: Your brand strategy describes your position in the marketplace and in your customers’ minds. With brand strategy, you’re still thinking broadly about your customers’ needs, your competitors’ positioning and how and where your consumers make decisions regarding brand loyalty. Your brand strategy must clearly and powerfully articulate who you are as an organization and why you exist to uniquely meet your customers’ needs.

Tracy says that strong brands have a strong brand architecture that begins with a set of core values, beliefs and practices within the company; these elements will explain everything about why you have chosen to produce your particular kind of product or service, which will resonate powerfully with a certain segment of the population whose journeys, preferences and values match your own to the degree that they trust you and want to do business with you.

The architecture also includes a deep understanding of your target customers values and preferences (persona), the larger context or frame of reference in which her buying decisions are made (marketplace), and first-hand insight, preferably through focus groups, questionnaires and the like, of her thought processes.

Marketing strategy: By the time you get to marketing strategy, you are focusing on what, and how, you are communicating with your community. The key activities include marketing analysis and segmentation, developing messaging and collateral, prioritizing channels, developing influencer programs where useful and measuring the results of these activities through the use of CRM, dashboards and other ways of reporting.

Tracy notes that the increasing public sensitivity to privacy issues is quietly transforming the usual marketing mix among paid, earned, and owned properties. “It’s really a matter of what was old is now new,” she explains. “With more people buying direct, you've got to continue capturing email, because the more that paid tools are going away due to privacy issues, targeting becomes more difficult. And earned is at the mercy of a journalist. So you've got to continue to build your own channels around email and SMS.” 

We all know that the world is not exactly being underserved by content, but that doesn’t mean that someone who has found you or whom you have found wouldn’t just love to receive a nice piece of content that helps them with their buying decision. And what is true of someone who has just discovered you is even more true for someone who has already bought something from you. So keep working towards email acquisition, making sure that your backend repository, your CRM system and your database, are ship shape and that the data you’re getting is as clean and shiny as a new penny.

This brings us full circle to the theme of our blog, which is building your marketing strategy on a foundation of business and brand strategy. The best marketing programs I know of bake their larger mission and long-term goals – their business strategy – right into their product descriptions that go on their packaging, labels and web pages. They have a deep understanding of their customer and marketplace and their differentiation from their competitors – their brand architecture – and reflect this in every piece of marcom they produce. They integrate their values stem to stern, and that’s why we remember them.

What are you doing to make sure your marketing strategy aligns with your business and brand strategies? Give me a shout!

Sincerely,

Rob Craven, scalepassion

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All credit to my ghostwriting partner, Dave Moore, who is instrumental in getting my thoughts out in a coherent manner & into these blogs. Thanks Dave!