Imperative to marketing is a message and an audience. The culmination of how the two come together will determine overall effectiveness of your promotion strategy. Every marketer should be thinking about how they connect with customers through digital marketing. Campaigns that work well are usually initiated from well-developed ideas stemming from access to information and meaningful conversations. The difference between you and your top competitor can be as simple as having the conversations that matter.
A marketing plan requires brainstorming of promotional problems unique to a business. Eventually a marketer finds him or herself envisioning the effects that every tweak will have on bottom-line sales. But until he or she has first gathered a full-scale assessment for what is needed from bottom to top, it will be challenging to implement and maintain a perfect marketing strategy.
Marketing issues tend to run deep and can easily be overlooked. Therefore, it is vital to innovate new ways of drilling down to the root of promotional problems that occur:
- Are the digital components set up properly?
- Could our target audiences have shifted?
- Would day-parting from 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. make an impact?
As a marketer, questions like these arise every day. Weeks or even months can go by fine-tuning an existing campaign or laying out the blueprint for a new one. We can all agree it is frustrating when you find recurring symptoms to your marketing problems. Perhaps this time around, you seek outside assistance. You garner the opinions of others.
This begins with good old-fashioned conversations – email won’t help you much here – face-to-face interactions will be most impactful to unveiling real problems. Your eventual solutions will be assembled from these problems.
Personable interactions internally will foster creativity. Your immediate co-workers have ideas you have yet to think of yourself. Don’t discount the feedback of employees working hard on the front lines. Everyone is valuable; and with the right people around the table, creativity arises, and amazing things ensue from there.
Once you’ve assembled your internal ‘dream-team,’ see what an external marketing agency thinks. Ask them to meet with you about your business. Make sure the agency is legitimate by asking good upfront questions. Weed out external companies that make a proposal on the first meeting. Think about it – they barely know you – they don’t understand your problems, so how can they possibly propose effective solutions? A good marketing agency will interview you before they propose solutions.
Ideas are invaluable and will increase the ROI you see from your marketing efforts. A good outside marketing agency will brainstorm ideas as if they have a stake in your company, as if they are a vice president on your board of directors. They will brainstorm with you to cultivate your pre-existing ideas into competitive advantages amid your industry. Once you develop good rapport with a marketing agency you would feel comfortable working with, look to them as a business partner and guide rather than a vendor. There are major perks to paying for ad services with the right marketing partner, and those perks are expounded upon in Advance Media New York’s Marketing Tips (blog section). Your marketing agency will interview you to uncover the real problems they can help you solve.
Come up with a budget you feel comfortable investing with your marketing agency and have them scale a plan to fit within that range. Tell them to present the plan to your internal team or to put it into a user-friendly format. Having a good marketing agency at the edge of your fingertips can be extremely valuable to lowering your stress levels; saving you time and saving you money.
