Does your marketing department have the right strategy?

I have been around marketing efforts for companies, services, and products.  Most of it has been for oilfield products.  A few projects I have been a part of have been major marketing efforts that had a substantial budget.  I have discussed brochures, animations, videos, articles, ads, and in 2015 I had a meeting about billboards.

After watching all these efforts play out, as well as reading and listening to hours of podcasts (my commute for a year was 1.5 hours each way), I’ve arrived at my definition of marketing:

Marketing is creating and distributing relevant content that will educate, entertain, and/or engage the customer with consistency.

Successful marketing boils down to the value that you bring your customer in every interaction. Whether it is by delivering a superior product or when they are reading your content. The goal should be to bring them value. When a customer recognizes that you or your organization bring them value, they are more likely to remember you when making a buying decision.

Create Content

Content can be any written, audio, or video. The key to marketing is to make the content relevant to your customer.

Fundamentally, the intent of your content needs to be bringing value to your customer first, not delivering a message about your products. The content can deliver value through education, entertainment, and engagement.

The easiest way to bring value to your customer is to educate them using the knowledge that you and your organization have learned throughout your experiences. If you are providing a service, product, or technology it is likely that you and your organization are among the most knowledgeable people in the world about your work. You have unique information that would be valuable to your customer as they expand their knowledge and perform better in their work.

Ultimately becoming a trusted source of valuable information to your customers is more valuable to your operations than 100 sales calls with a brochure.

Though not as straight forward, and possibly harder to execute, delivering relevant and entertaining content to your customer will bring value. Everyone values a lighter moment. For B2B companies, entertaining content has another benefit and that is the element of surprise. Customers are not expecting entertaining content from their suppliers and if done correctly it could differentiate you in their minds. Especially if they already trust you as a source of valuable information.

Creating opportunities to engage with your customer will bring value to them as well. This can be done through live webinars, events, podcasts, and even just the comments section of your written content. It provides another chance for your customer to recognize you as someone who is responsive to their needs as they work to achieve their goals.

Consistency

Almost more important than the content is delivering the content consistently. With this quantity becomes more important than quality. If you are frozen by the desire to deliver the “perfect” content, you are not going to be optimizing your chance to reach your customer. Of course, the goal needs to have the highest value content possible, but it does not need to be at the detriment of consistency.

If you truly intend to bring your customer value, then produce the best content you can and ship it. As your quantity increases your quality will increase, practice makes perfect. Regardless of how hard you work on your first piece of content, the 100th piece is going to be far superior.

Distribution

Once the content is created it is necessary to distribute it in a place where your customers can consume it. This is largely done on your website, through email, and on social media platforms. Depending on the type business you are in B2B vs. B2C it will help guide you to which platform to use. For instance, LinkedIn is the place for B2B content while Instagram or Facebook are the platforms for B2C.

While posting your content can organically reach your customers, these platforms also have ad products that let you target your specific audience for optimized delivery of your message. This fact, along with the ability to track engagement with your information makes distributing your content only superior to more traditional methods.

Marketing

Marketing is creating and distributing relevant content that will educate, entertain, and/or engage the customer with consistency.

As with most strategies, it is simple on paper but difficult to execute. I am convinced that if your marketing department isn’t following this strategy, or one like it, they are overspending on marketing. Whatever strategy they’re following is costing more to achieve worse benefits. I can help you and your company reach more customers, create more leads, and increase the profile of your business by implementing this strategy. Please contact me!