In my last post, hopefully I convinced you that doing less is actually a way to learn how to do better marketing. It allows you to focus your marketing strategy and activities, and can result in immediate improvement to your brand awareness, marketing presence, and inbound traffic.
This week, I want to cover five ways you can improve your marketing clarity and effectiveness by staying sharp and narrowing your focus to the following very specific points:
1) Focus on a Specific Component, Step, or Stage of the Marketing Program
A marketing program is often anything but simplistic. It typically consists of:
- multiple, concurrently executed campaigns
- a variety of marketing channels
- different types of targeted prospects at varying stages of awareness, each with their own concerns and interests
- a host of different marketing tools to execute and measure impact
Therefore, it would be overwhelming to try to improve everything at once. It would be overwhelming even just to try improving a particular marketing channel or campaign all at once.
To make a dent in the whole program, you will have to choose your battle and pick what you want to focus on first. Ex: The traffic of inbound web leads from the website, or the interactions with your company’s official social media outlets on Twitter or Facebook.
2) Focus on a Specific Type of Activity or Specific Conversion Step
To turn the exercise into something that is actually measurable, you need to focus on a specific activity or outcome that is measurable and is meaningful. For example, let’s say the generation of new inbound web leads relies on three specific conversion points throughout the website. Your first step should be determining which of those conversion points is the most crucial or needs the most improvement (where the largest number of your prospects are getting stuck). Focus on that one conversion point only. Test, iterate, test, iterate, until you are able to see positive results.
It is important to keep your focus as sharp and targeted as possible. Ex: “Improving social media engagement” is too broad and vague. Something like, “increasing the immediate level of engagement with the company’s next marketing announcement on Facebook” is better.
The key to successfully identifying these specific targets for improvement is to think of them as “sticking points” or “bottlenecks” that are hampering your marketing operations, or “leakage” points that are draining away your marketing investments. Defined in those terms, you should identify the most important leverage points that enable better performance for that particular marketing activity or channel.
3) Focus on the Output for a Specific Market Segment and the Target Prospect in that Segment
This is a further filter that lets you better measure and evaluate the effectiveness of the improvement steps. As noted in my previous blog posts, aiming to please a heterogeneous group of targets is a futile exercise that will also confuse any analytical insights you might gain from the whole process. Therefore, it is important to be specific in terms of the content and targets of the marketing activities you want to improve.
Are you aiming your efforts at a particular target segment prospect, target segment customers, or target segment partners, etc? Only by being able to answer those questions with some level of clarity and confidence are you able to have a sharp enough focus for your marketing investment.
4) Focus on SMART Goals that Drive Impact for Doing Business in the Target Segment
Now that you have really defined the target of your improvement exercise, it is important to set SMART goals that motivate you and your team to actually go out and generate results with real impact. Not only do your goals need to be SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timely), they should also correlate with ultimate business goals. They are better as “outcome-driven” goals rather than “activity goals” (aka “quota”), because activity or volume-based goals can be achieved without truly challenging the status quo and making a meaning improvement.
5) Focus on a Closed Loop Process
This should be a process in which improvement steps are first planned, prioritized, and executed, then measured and evaluated against prior performance or benchmarks. Once adopted or rejected, they should then used to generate additional improvement steps or ideas, and the process should repeat. This is an extremely important process to get right. It also requires a lot of discipline to adhere to, especially when marketers can’t wait to execute on their ideas, without ensuring that the impact of those ideas can be measured and replicated.
This all may sound like a lot, but successful marketing organizations have always incorporated most if not all of these principles in how they execute and strategize. And so can you.
