Marketing develops the outward representation of a company. It's how business owners communicate their offerings, mission, and values to the public. However, these messages must resonate with the audience more than just being ad copy. Customers want to believe in your company. Aligning your marketing strategy to communicate authentically engages your ideal buyers and helps your company reach its goals.
Staying true to your company vision may be second nature, but communicating that vision and how it can help your customers may not be. Many business owners want to connect with their clients more meaningfully but struggle to align a marketing plan and company vision. If that sounds like you, you are in the right place.
In this post, we will discuss some tips for arranging your marketing strategy to adhere to and enforce your company vision.
Aligning Your Goals and Company Vision
The first step is reframing your objectives. Consider what you have developed about your company and its vision, then re-write your goals so that they adhere to them.
Here are some questions to review to ensure your goals reinforce your vision:
- What is it that you want to achieve?
- Is attaining the goal in line with your values and vision?
- What steps do you need to take to realize these goals?
- Are any actions required to attain your goals at cross-purposes with your values?
Revolve Goals Around Your Customers
Since your company vision affects who you attract, you must keep your customers top of mind when planning how to achieve your vision. What is important to them? How will they perceive your efforts?
For instance, let's say you have an environmentally conscious company. Your target audience values green energy, conservation, and contributing to environmental causes. Your marketing should focus on what is essential to the people you want to attract while staying aligned with your company's core values. One way to grow sales could be with a promotional campaign around offsetting carbon emissions to explain its benefits and showcase how your company achieves it.
Get Employee Insight
Your employees, particularly those who interact directly with customers, have unique insight into how your company adheres to its goals. They can be a goldmine of data for insight into how the company is doing. Do the employees understand your company's core values and beliefs, and if so, do their job tasks help reinforce them?
Do they have evidence that the customers are responding to the marketing tactics, such as by asking questions regarding promotions? Sending out surveys or conducting site visits gets you more personalized insight. Asking for honest feedback and speaking one-on-one with workers also helps reinforce your commitment to your mission.
Choosing Marketing Tactics for Your Vision
Pick marketing tactics that reach your customers and help you convey your message. Your message is only effective if it reaches your intended audience. That means it is vital that you identify and leverage the channels where your ideal customers spend their time. Creating buyer personas using customer feedback, market research, and analysis of search data helps you understand their motivations and pain points, as well as the channels they interact with most actively.
With this insight into customer behaviors and intent, you can shape your messaging to resonate with them. Going back to the previous example, your ideal customers are environmentally conscious. You know through research that they routinely consume content on their phones and computers, such as video and music streaming. An effective tactic to reach them would be using digital and video ads that share more details about the carbon offsetting program.
You could create video or audio ads sharing that information or in-depth articles or videos that discuss your company’s carbon offset initiatives more fully.
Ensure Tactics Fit Your Company
No matter what marketing tactic you use, it should make sense for your company. Your environmentally conscious business would not resonate with customers (or adhere to your values) if you chose direct mail flyers that require cutting trees for paper, using gas for driving around and delivering them, or using a plane to fly a banner over a city.
Whether you use email marketing, audio, or sponsored content, your message should keep the customer in mind and align with your company's mission, values, and vision. Review and analyze results over time to know how they are performing, adjust them accordingly, and always watch for new places to reach your customers.
Staying True to Your Vision Conveys Authenticity
Staying true to your vision and conveying authenticity to your customers means setting goals and taking action to achieve them that align with your ideals.
When you need help aligning a marketing plan and company vision, McClatchy can help. We are the nation's second-largest local media company, helping you connect with communities on a national scale.
Contact us today to see how we can help you grow your reach and communicate your vision while achieving your goals.
