This article talks about the importance of a consistent marketing strategy and how you can ensure that you have one.
The buzz around marketing is far from over. With the increasing relevance of digital marketing, it has become impertinent for businesses to plan their strategies and set the ball rolling to ensure advantageous ROI.
Sounds like a workable plan, doesn’t it? But are you getting what you wanted from your marketing campaign? Is the strategy working? Have you fleetingly moved from one idea to another? Are you not sure what’s working and what’s not?
While it’s important to address these questions, the best thing to do right away is to take a step back. Go back to your basics. Start from the very first question – ‘what is marketing’?
Today, let’s begin from there and continue to see how important it is to have a consistent marketing approach.
According to any standard definition, marketing is ‘the process or technique of promoting, selling, or distributing a product or service’. However, as the gap between businesses and audiences decreases it is important that we re-look at the standard understanding.
Today customers/ audiences are close to businesses, and they expect more transparency and involvement. It is important to keep this in mind while formulating any marketing strategy. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen often. Any effort to build a relationship for the sake of marketing is often not put. Rather, organizations get fixated on fulfilling the transactional goal, easily ignoring the need to build a relationship with customers.
But when a marketing strategy looks beyond the obvious goals and invests in building relationships, they benefit in the long run. There can be many ways of building a long-lasting and strong relationship with your audience, but the key is consistency.
How To Ensure You Have a Consistent Marketing Strategy
Before you begin any marketing strategy, it’s important to understand not just your end goals but also how to best take everyone there.
Let’s talk with an example.
But before you begin, let’s assume you have identified a few basics such as –
- Your target audiences’ problems, wants and needs,
- How your product or service can address their problems, wants and needs,
- The kind of messaging that will work best to connect with your audience.
Once these basic things are taken care of, you begin by drafting a blog post. Here you talk about the problem (identified during research), and how your product/ service solves it. Once the blog is posted, you share it on social media expecting it to have the desired effect on your audience. Unfortunately, after a few weeks, the results aren’t promising. Either the readers of the blogs haven’t converted into customers (your end goal), or you cannot identify if they did. Looking at the stats you decide that blogging was a waste of time and decide on trying something ‘new’.
So, what went wrong? There can be two reasons for this marketing debacle –
Firstly, your patience waned quickly, and you decided that since the ROI wasn’t immediately reflected, all resources (money, time, and effort) spent on the blog were wasted.
Secondly, you didn’t think through it before blogging. Basically, you committed a random act without considering the importance of a consistent marketing strategy.
Plan to Become Consistent
Yes, preparing a marketing plan from scratch can be overwhelming. We understand that. It takes not just effort but can also test your patience – over and over again! But if you are to succeed, you must plan for consistency.
Where should you begin with planning?
Our suggestion would be to approach things tactically.
- Channels You Should Use – Start by deciding where and how to reach your audience. Determine where your audience can be mostly found? How can you reach them? Are they on social media platforms? Which platform has a better reach among your audience? What about their email addresses? Can those be used? What about events? Can you reach them there?
- Frequency of your messaging – Next, you must decide how often should you reach your audience. How often should you connect with them?
- Content management – Since content is at the core of your messaging, you must decide their frequency, the tone you use, the type of content you post, etc.
It is always a wise decision to use keep the messaging same across channels. For example, create content that can be used for YouTube videos, shared on Facebook, and posted on your blog. This way, you save resources, time, and effort. Also, you maintain consistency.
Once you have figured out the basics, your next job should be to schedule and then execute. Scheduling is crucial for the success of your marketing campaign. Use an editorial calendar that will help you mark everything from the channels to be used, tactics incorporated, frequency of postings, topics, who will execute, etc. Once you start using an editorial calendar, you will realize that it is easy to plan for consistency.
Wait for the Snowball Effect!
Consistency doesn’t show results immediately but when it does, it snowballs! Yes, building a relationship with your audience is a time-consuming effort. You must be patient, analytical, refined, consistent, patient, analytical, refined…. Yes! This must go on and on.
Unless you continue to perform (consistently), you will not enjoy the results. But once you strategically begin to perform consistently, the efforts will multiply and pay off. The wait can be worth it.
Perform Consistently with Marketing
By now you must have understood the importance of consistency in marketing. It all sounds fine and promising in words. But how do you achieve it? How do you ensure that you are on the right track (of winning audience attention)?
The best thing to do is seek help when you feel lost. Cyrusson Inc. is a boutique digital marketing agency that has the expertise to improve your digital presence. We have helped scores of small and medium-sized businesses improve their social media reach, customer engagement, and content sharing methods through consistent and well-planned marketing strategies.
We believe that the path to success in digital marketing is simple – have a plan and the rest does not till it is achieved. Now, the plan must not be unidirectional. It must be an involving and evolving plan that changes according to audience acceptance/rejection.
If you think your marketing efforts lack the vision and aren’t consistent – talk to us. Send us a message or book a free consultation – we are here to help you.