How to master your marketing strategy

When it comes to technology, there is more choice than any marketer knows what to do with. While the basics include CRM, marketing automation, e-marketing and analytics, there are also powerful add-on technologies that if your budget can afford it, you would crazy not to include.

Marketing strategies are important. By planning out your year, it ensures that you have clear goals for your company and a roadmap for achieving them.

At Marketing Eye, our marketing strategies are very detailed, usually between 20 and 50 pages in length. They incorporate marketing objectives, brand, digital and all other tactical aspects of marketing that may be implemented over any given year.

What we try to do is have our marketing managers understand the business strategy for the company in an indepth way. We require them to understand in detail the financial repercussions of marketing, and what effect it has on revenue. If a proper marketing automation program is in place, its important that marketing is given a responsibility for revenue in which is derived from marketing assets. This ensures that a more collaborative approach is achieved with sales and marketing as a whole.

Mastering a marketing strategy isn't easy. What is most important is that your marketing strategy is relevant and not just a duplication of last year's efforts. When a marketing strategy is developed, it is essential to look at the strategy and make sure that it isn't generic. Overarching strategies are important, but its the tactical elements that really matter. 

B2B marketing strategies should incorporate:

Website

Singularly the most powerful marketing tool you have, your website is crucial to your 2015/16 marketing strategy. If you treat your website as a brochure, you are creating the single biggest opportunity for your customers. A successful website is the hub for your online presence and it needs to represent your brand, your point of difference, and reasons why people should choose you over your competitors.

Ensuring that your website is a lead generator and has the added feature of marketing automation is essential, giving your sales team prospects that are warm and ready to make buying decisions.

If you didn't make the deadline for mobile friendly websites dictated by Google, then don't expect your business to be sitting anywhere where your prospects can find you and pull out the budget for Adwords so you can play catchup with you smarter, more responsive competitors.

Search engine optimisation

Thousands of people find Marketing Eye each week through search engine optimisation. Once they arrive at Marketing Eye's website, they then choose to contact us or at the very least connect with us on social media. Ensuring that you have invested in SEO is imperative to prospects finding your business, and once the investment has been made and maintained, you will find that the results speak for themselves and the ROI is on your balance sheet.

Social media

With 70,000 plus followers on Twitter, almost 20,000 on LinkedIn on various Marketing Eye accounts, we have firmly established ourselves as the leader in Australia in the SMB marketing space. Research has shown that 60% of buyers check out new service providers on social media, making it a more commonly used source of information than formal referrals and recommendations.


Marketing automation

Not in your budget? Don't know what it is? Think it's just another piece of technology? Think again. Marketing automation replaces manual processes with automated ones, bringing together all of your online marketing channels into one centralised system for creating, managing, and measuring programs and campaigns. 

For those who are unsure of marketing automations role when it comes to customer relationship management and the inherent differences; CRM tracks and organises opportunities and client information. It helps you stay organised and connected throughout the entire lifecycle of your client.

Public relations

The PR game is many things; content creators, media managers, publicists, social media engagement officers. Many companies have foolishly moved budget from PR to newer, shinier marketing areas, and found that that has worked to a degree, but hasn't quite cemented the company's brand in the way traditional PR is able to effectively. Capturing PR as an integral part of the marketing mix will help collaborate marketing efforts, sending key messages across multiple channels and effectively hitting target repetitively. No brainer!