One of the big issues for a lot of marketing and sales professionals is the proliferation of buzz words and meaningless jargon that penetrates the part of a business that is essential to making sure your business creates a market for its products and services.
In my never-ending quest to help demystify the marketing process and to tie marketing to results, here are 10 things you should consider that can make your marketing have a greater impact and to get out of the marketing jargon and buzz word business.
1. Start by understanding a buyer:
In general, I am a little reluctant to get into heavy expenditures on “brand building” campaigns that target large, unspecific populations of people.
Why?
They are expensive.
But they also are time intensive.
And, they can’t be measured.
Which means that too many advertisers and marketers can easily use this as coverage for not doing a good job.
So begin by understanding the buyer you are trying to reach and why.
2. Personas:
If you start by understanding your buyers, you can create personas for the types of people that you are trying to reach.
This will help you be more effective in your messaging and your outreach.
Of course there is a downside to creating personas if you try to push too much stuff into one persona so that the personas become meaningless.
3. Your marketing should be targeted on creating customers & fans:
One of the big wraps against marketing is that it is so much BS.
You can never link marketing to money…
That’s not always a false argument either.
As a marketer, your job is to turn your marketing spend into money…by creating fans and customers.
4. What are you trying to influence?
At the top of the page, I mentioned my reluctance to buy in on a lot of “brand building” marketing because of the time and cost involved, along with the difficulty in measuring it effectively.
That’s why you need to spend a good amount of effort on understanding what exactly you are attempting to influence with your marketing effort.
Do you want someone to take an action?
Make a purchase?
What?
5. Marketing should position your brand, product, or service in a specific way:
Again, your marketing shouldn’t be about some meaningless thing like “brand building,” “engagement,” or “buzz.”
Your marketing should have a specific ambition. That ambition should be to position what you are selling in a specific way.
6. The best advertising, marketing, and branding creates some sort of emotional connection:
Think about your favorite things, they create an emotion…right?
So do the best products and brands.
Starbucks? Pretty polarizing.
Apple? Avid fans and haters.
Hillary Clinton? Same thing.
Donald Trump? Yes and yes!
So on and on.
7. Great marketing gives you the permission you need to continue to talk with your audience:
One thing I know for sure is that marketing, selling, branding, and any form of communication is about having the chance to keep having that conversation.
Great marketing needs to give you the chance to continue your conversation with your targets.
8. B2B marketing needs to be focused on B2B buyers and they are different than B2C buyers:
Duh!
Think personas and needs.
9. B2C buyers are different than B2B:
See above!
10. Your marketing should be focused on building long term relationships:
Unless you are a fly by night operation or a single call transaction, you need to always be focusing on relationships.
Building them.
Adding value to them.
Growing them.