No matter where you are with marketing efforts, there is always room for improvement.
A DemandGen report recently found that 42% of marketers rated their company's marketing campaign efforts and impacts as 'Needs Improvement,' followed by 30% reporting that it is 'Average,' 16% saying it is 'Poor/Inadequate.' Only 11% responded with 'Excellent.' This means that most companies could use a refresher regardless of the current progress achieved in building a better marketing strategy.
When it comes down to it, marketing has many moving parts and can feel challenging when results are slow or lacking. So, to improve marketing, sometimes the best strategy is to review all elements and rework. Here's what you need to know about how to improve digital marketing strategies and achieve better marketing results.
Building a Better Marketing Strategy
Improvements can be made no matter how long you’ve been in business. This is particularly true in an ever-evolving industry like marketing.
Here are our top tips for building a better marketing strategy and improving your results.
1. Start with a Goal
To build a better strategy, goals need to be set. After all, by setting goals for your marketing strategy, you increase the odds of success by as much as 376%. When you leverage SMART — Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely — goals particularly, you increase your odds even further because they're designed to be more realistic and measurable, allowing you to know when you've achieved the accomplishment.
Examples of business goals to improve can include:
- Conversion rates
- More traffic to your website
- Grow your email list
- Increase your number of social media followers
2. Analyze Current Marketing Strategies
Evaluate where you stand with your current strategies and how you can better improve in certain areas. Start by asking yourself: what are my strengths and weaknesses in my strategy? Where can I leverage more of our strengths while improving upon our weaknesses?
Marketing Analytics will play an essential role in this step.
Studying data to better evaluate your marketing performance results is crucial to improving your strategies.
Marketing Analytics — divided into three categories: Descriptive (what happened in the past), Predictive (past data helps predict future results), and Prescriptive (past data informs the impact of future actions) — allows you to:
- Better understand your target audience
- Make informed decisions and predictions on initiatives
- Monitor performance, and
- Optimize your results with real-time improvements.
3. Understand Your Audience Better
Review your target audience and make updates on their current standing. This is crucial to come back to and regularly evaluate because consumer behaviors are constantly changing, and your ideal audience may have shifted while you focused more on appeasing the audience represented in outdated buyer personas. HubSpot goes as far as recommending a buyer persona update at least every quarter.
Furthermore, if you genuinely want to know and understand your audience better, you will need to take your updated personas and segment them even further by:
- Age
- Location
- Behaviors
- Genders
- Profession
- Income
After all, your product/service may appeal to several different demographics, psychographics, and geographic. Every segment will require another way and preference for communication.
4. Know Your Place in the Market
Take a moment to source and review other competitors:
- Understand how your prices, products, and services compare
- Where can you improve?
- Any weak points from competitors?
Use this insight to improve your market position and find gaps your competition isn't filling so you can bring more value to consumers. However, be careful with this step because while you'll want to use this insight to make improvements, you'll want to avoid copying them entirely while making your changes.
The key is to differentiate, improve, and stand out — not replicate companies that may be performing better than you.
5. Define Future Business Objectives
Start thinking about and working toward the future. Sometimes it can be tempting to only think about the 'now' and the short-term goals that can help you achieve results at this moment or even in the next few months. This would be a mistake because some of the most impactful strategies are in the long term.
If your current goals and strategies aren't aligned with your vision for the business's future, you risk never actually achieving that vision and optimizing your results.
Work future goals into your current plan, leverage a sweet mix of short and long-term objectives to achieve maximum results now, and inform future decisions.
So, how can marketers utilize digital media to improve business and work towards future goals? McClatchy.
Building on your current progress and creating better marketing isn't easy. It requires a lot of skill, experience, and knowledge on the best channels for your objectives. One of the best ways to improve your marketing performance is by ensuring you’re doing the basics well. It forms a strong foundation from which the rest of your marketing will excel. Contact us to learn how McClatchy can get your business's marketing strategy where it needs to be.
