Running a business is rewarding, but as it grows, it can become complicated with too many moving pieces. Marketing often falls to the wayside and gets neglected as a non-essential business function, which could not be further from the truth.
Coming up with a strategy for your business and marketing is an effective way to make sure all the parts of your business are performing at their absolute best and working in unison to achieve the goals you desire. A marketing strategy, in particular, can help optimize resource usage.
The goals established in a marketing strategy provide clarity, purpose, direction and vision. They function as benchmarks for success, and the goals set in a marketing strategy essentially define what success will look like for that strategy.
Marketing goals can be divided into four broad categories: raising brand awareness, generating high-quality leads, increasing customer value and empowering team members to function as brand evangelists. These form the focus areas over which marketing departments or teams will be responsible.
These areas of concern can be given attention in alignment with your business goals. Areas that do not help your business achieve its objectives can be ignored. In this article, we explore five goals for your next marketing strategy that could maximize your results.
Marketing Strategy Goals
1. Increase brand awareness.
The market is a cacophony of thousands of brands clamoring for consumer attention. Being able to stand out and get noticed in the chaos needs to be a top priority. Brand awareness ensures consumers consider your brand whenever they need a solution to a particular problem.
The platforms you use to interact with consumers and the tone of your messaging create a personality for your brand. The first step to raising brand awareness is developing an understanding of your brand’s personality.
The strategy around this goal involves considering where your target audience spends most of their time. Being present in the spaces they frequent increases your visibility to them. Interacting with them in those spaces, through efforts like brand activations, take that visibility and turn it into brand awareness. Deploying well-trained brand ambassadors makes your brand more approachable and friendly. Field marketing helps create delightful and memorable brand experiences and that goes a long way toward establishing brand awareness.
2. Generate high-quality leads.
For sales departments to function optimally, they require a steady stream of qualified leads to turn into paying customers or clients. While sales departments have their own customer acquisition initiatives, the marketing department is the primary source of these leads.
Marketing efforts need to either collect a lead’s information or incentivize them to contact the sales team directly. While leads are fairly abundant, high-quality leads are much harder to come by. These are individuals who have expressed interest in the brand and are likely to make a purchase with the right guidance. Generally, trends exist across leads who eventually become paying customers and gathering data to track these trends is a key part of marketing.
Effective communication between marketing and sales teams can help gather multi-dimensional data about leads and sales, which can help the marketing team refine their buyer personas and pivot their marketing efforts.
3. Increase customer value.
Marketing goes beyond simply generating new business. It involves delighting the customer base and maintaining relationships with existing consumers and clients. Keeping those customers happy and curious ensures your brand remains a top priority whenever they have to make a purchasing decision.
Happy consumers are also loyal consumers. They will not just purchase your products and services, they will also evangelize your brand to their respective communities. Happy customers are the most effective brand ambassadors. In interactions with their friends, family and colleagues, they will give organic testimonials of how your brand provided the perfect solution to their problem. They may even compare your brand to a previous solution that did not give them the same satisfaction, positioning your brand as a superior option.
Word of mouth marketing is a valuable customer acquisition method that provides sustainable and long-lasting growth. Delighted customers are more easily persuaded to purchase complementary products that satisfy other needs in their lives. Once your brand is a staple in every part of their lifestyle, your product ecosystem naturally generates its own brand awareness.
In order to make the most of loyal consumers as organic marketing assets, consider running campaigns that encourage consumers to refer their friends and family to purchase your product or service.
The effectiveness of your strategy to increase customer value can be measured by observing upsell and retention statistics.
4. Empower your colleagues.
Marketing efforts are often directed outward but internal communication can generate real value. Educating employees within the business at all levels on the resources available to them for providing service to customers ensures the whole team functions cohesively to contribute to marketing efforts.
Team members should have at least a passing knowledge of the brand’s target personas and their needs at various stages of the buyer journey. When they can speak about the business with confidence to prospective customers and even their personal circles, that confidence conveys authority and reassures the consumer that the product is worth purchasing.
Conclusion
Strategy-driven marketing increases efficiency and frees up resources for other areas of the business. Aligning your business strategy with your marketing strategy makes it significantly easier to focus on running your business and keeps all your team members on the same page. Most importantly, an effective marketing strategy ensures that marketing activities are not left as an afterthought.
If you are developing your marketing strategy and need to help your brand stand out with field marketing, get in touch with us. We will be happy to have a conversation with you about how you can integrate field marketing with your other marketing activities.