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CC0 License – Pixabay
In part-1, we discussed Blueprint, Funnel, Media and Audience and why they are so important. Now we will focus on four more ways for you to round out your marketing ecosystem’s success.
Key Message… Throw Your Dart
After the customer definition becomes clear, now determine your key messages designed to target and relate to those customer attributes. It’s very important for your marketing team to understand not only the customer’s funnel location but also their attributes. This makes creating content a lot easier because both of these provide a target for which you will throw your marketing content dart. Without the information that defines both the funnel location and customer, it’s very hard to create content that is relevant and triggers customers to take action.
Conversions
Each piece of content should ideally have a conversion metric. That can be challenging, especially with brand marketing that typically doesn’t have a strong CTA and is placed in areas that may not be easily tracked. However, you may choose to measure brand marketing by website visits, phone calls social media followers. Those are a great place to start. Friendly URLs and specific phone numbers can also work. Keep in mind, unless you’re selling online products with a direct link to an online shopping cart and checkout, it will always be challenging to track/quantify brand marketing.
Additionally, you may choose not to measure “everything” because that creates volumes of data to stream in that quite frankly you may not be able to keep up with. Think about the conversion metric that provides information most important for your marketing team to make better decisions — measure those only. Once you start this process you will see that it really does yield great results, and will over time help you see what’s working, what’s not working and what needs attention. Measurement and conversion as you can see are twins that work very well together for your marketing to be more successful.
Repurpose
Like any good marketing strategy, you must look at the repurpose value for each piece of content you are producing. When you decide to repurpose content, your cost of production goes down and your marketing value and ROI go up. Think about how to leverage each piece of content to obtain maximum value. It’s not just smart marketing but it’s also smart business.
Here’s an example: When an eBook is written and produced, and you finally got approval that it’s ready for prime time. Now you can begin to look at it with another eye for repurposing it to be used on other channels. For instance, you can use it for blogs, social media, website content, sales presentations, infographics and even videos. Now, one piece of shared content becomes valuable in six to seven different areas. Now that’s repurposing!
Investment
In this part of the strategic you want to monetize each area or piece of content that is distributed. Here’s a quick way to do it. Anything your staff produces in-house exclusively can be a “0” cost because it’s owned media and lasts forever unless you delete it or remove it from circulation. If your team is also producing and distributing your own PR, that can also be a “0” cost. Please know this part is not a budgeted item but an overview of monies invested in the process.
Paid media is totally different. If your marketing is producing content that is distributed to publishers and they are billing you for that media placement, that cost becomes part of the investment line. Pretty simple. Track these costs monthly to stay on top of where your money and time is going.
The Power Starts Here
As you can see, a marketing ecosystem strategy is a wonderful planning process that provides structure, purpose, direction, validation, and value all in one place. I can’t imagine operating a swiftly moving marketing operation without it because chaos would quickly happen and then nobody knows the reason for marketing. The real power in this process is the knowledge and purpose the marketing team receives from it and how they use that knowledge to strategically target customers and create more effective content. Marketing is not just exclusively creative anymore. Today, it’s closer to psychological science and engineering all wrapped-up in a strategy that delivers a powerful impact for your brand.
Scott MacFarland is a lifetime digital marketer with 30 years of experience delivering value for hundreds of brands in dozens of industries. Today, Scott is the Marketing Director for HMY Yachts in Jupiter, Florida.
Scott MacFarland @scmacfarland
Photo Credit: CC0 License – Pixabay
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