jmherman

Having good ideas is the first step, but how do you actually improve your existing marketing efforts? I’ll strive to answer that question today.

If you’ve read my previous blogs, hopefully I’ve convinced you that quality marketing should be centered around nurturing a long-term relationship with your customers, which starts with a clear understanding of the consumer and ends with a compelling, engaging, and believable brand identity. Based on this goal for your marketing, you should be able to assess how well you’re doing with your current efforts. Note that failure can come from several places, and it doesn’t mean everything is bad. You might have a compelling brand identity that’s ineffectual due to bad research – perhaps you’re highly successful at marketing to a younger demographic, but fail to consider that your company isn’t appealing to the parents making the spending decisions. Conversely, you might have a great understanding of your consumers but have a robotic company persona that isn’t captivating or believable. If you have either of these issues, stop to consider the fact that you’re already halfway there. Often the difference between a bad marketing campaign and a successful one is as simple as a quick change in phrasing, and you don’t need to throw out all or even most of the work you’ve already done. This is important to keep in mind as we move towards implementing your ideas.

Once you’ve identified a flaw in your current marketing efforts (or simply future potential), you have to get everyone on the same page internally. Realigning the marketing efforts of a company is a daunting process, with many steps of its own. You need to get (at least) a full room of people to agree on your goals, and a way to measure those goals. Before you can even start, it’s usually necessary to get people to agree that there’s a problem. My first tip is to consider how you frame this process. Telling your boss you have ideas to help a lagging campaign or improve upon the next is far more likely to succeed than angrily saying: “What we’re doing sucks! We need to change it!”. If you ever find yourself on the opposite end of that equation, you’ll note the difference between offering new ideas for improvement instead of criticizing someone else’s work. Far too often, internal failure comes from unresolved disagreements that could have been fixed with one conversation if not circumvented altogether. And, as we’ve noted above, it’s likely that much of the underlying work is not flawed.

Now, let’s recap. First, you need to figure out where you have room for improvement. You can start by evaluating how well your current implementation fits with your understanding of your consumers, and how well they’re responding to the brand image you’ve crafted. Remember that the goal is to cultivate a long-term relationship and connection with that base, not to drive them to immediate purchasing decisions. After you’ve found evidence of a flawed understanding of your market or an ineffective brand identity, be specific in what you want to change. When pitching your ideas to the team, it will help to have evidence supporting your points and key metrics to indicate the new effort is a success. This could be as simple as increasing the amount of likes you get or as detailed as performing sentiment analysis on all of the comments you receive and comparing the result with previous efforts. Finally, it would benefit you greatly to treat this as an iterative process. You shouldn’t get discouraged if your first proposal is rejected, nor should you get complacent and stop looking for future improvements if your first idea works out. There’s no ceiling to improving your marketing efforts, and the best time to start was yesterday. So begin today in earnest, and remember to start with the consumer!