Don’t Leave Your Marketing to Luck

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

While there are some things that we can leave to luck, your marketing shouldn’t be one of them. Unfortunately, we know there are still quite a few people who rely on luck as their sole marketing strategy.

They hit that publish button on their blog or social media post and hope for the best– never understanding why one thing is successful while another thing fails.

So while we all get lucky from time to time, (does going viral ring a bell?), when it comes to your marketing, your success doesn’t happen by chance.

It comes from a good marketing strategy, being intentional and consistent.

Create a Solid Marketing Strategy

When you have a solid strategy backing up every one of your marketing decisions, you don’t have to rely on luck because you’ll know exactly why something works or doesn’t work. However, to make your marketing  strategy, you need to do research and ask yourself these questions:

• What are the goals or objectives that your marketing should be helping you achieve? Is it leads and sales or simply brand awareness?

• Who are your customers? What are their general age, location, hobbies, interests, and values?

• Who are your competitors and what types of marketing are they doing?

• Which marketing channels and mediums make the most sense for your objectives, and reach your audience?

The goal of any marketing plan is to have the right content get in front of the right people at the right time to turn them into customers.

However, you can’t do that if you’re just creating content blindly without answering any of these questions first. Your marketing strategy should be the guide to the rest of your marketing content.

Marketing Must Be Intentional 

Once you have a clear strategy, now you can be intentional about your content. When we say content, we mean every single thing you create, from blogs email campaigns, social media posts, webpages, and advertisements, they should all reflect back to your marketing strategy.

Here are a couple of ways that you can make sure you are intentional about your content:

• Create a content calendar with topics and themes that can guide all of your content from website pages, blogs to social media posts, direct mail and even advertisements.
• Plan out social media posts ahead of time. Don’t wait until the day of to rush and make a post. Scheduling out a week to a month ahead of time can make sure that your posts have a meaning and goal behind them.
• Invest in paid advertising on social media and Google. Paid advertising gives you better control over exactly who is seeing your content, ensuring that the right people will see it.

Measure and Improve

Lastly, measure and test EVERYTHING. Marketing is a constant cycle of measuring, testing, and trying again.

From engagements, shares, and likes to impressions, page views, click through rates and conversions, there are plenty of indicators that can help you see how well your marketing is doing, and no shortage of tools to help you gather and interpret them.

A couple of our favorites are Sendible for social media reporting and the Google Analytics Dashboard for website activity.

Once you’ve gathered the data and insights, use them to refocus and shift your strategy and implementation. Don’t just leave it to chance. If you notice something isn’t working, then change it – test!

• Maybe you’re not reaching the right people, so you need to change the channels you’re on.
• Or maybe you are reaching the right people, but the content isn’t what they want or need.

Analytics can help to tell exactly what’s working and what isn’t.

So if you’re not feeling very lucky with your current marketing efforts and need help making a comprehensive strategy and regular content– that’s where we can help! Contact us today!