Successful inbound marketing engages prospects and leads them gently through the buying stages. Plan it out, and it goes relatively smoothly and offers up heaping rewards. Don't put adequate time into the overall strategy, and marketing initiatives break down. Here are four ways that lacking a solid strategy blows up a marketing campaign.
The team doesn't understand what they are trying to attain. This means goal-setting, folks. It's surprising how many marketing teams push forward with complex, time-consuming campaigns before deciding on the goal. Is it lead conversion? Brand visibility? Determining a goal lays the groundwork for all other aspects to fall into place and support the desired outcome. Every marketing campaign needs a measurable goal, and it's vital for each team member to know it and understand the part they play.
It reaches the wrong audience. Early homework on who the company's customers are, their pain points, and how they reach buying decisions is invaluable in creating a cohesive marketing campaign with strong ROI. If there is zero strategy on reaching and engaging your target audience, your marketing campaign is, well, doomed from the beginning. Familiarize yourself and your team with your buyers, and create content specific to their needs.
It distributes unrelated content. A good content strategy is key in building a high-yielding campaign. Creating random blog posts, videos, and ads fails to tie your message together, and prospects soon forget it and you. Leverage and expand your message by integrating the content so that all pieces form a complete picture of your company to the potential customer.
Lacking a solid strategy leaves marketing with unhelpful metrics. All initiatives should be able to be measured; otherwise marketing won't know if they worked. If a strategy doesn't exist, marketing misses key elements in the campaign that either made it or broke it. By designing a key performance indicator report up front, team members relate to the analytics from the beginning. This rounds out and completes the marketing campaign, and gives marketing a map of what to include and what to scrap in future endeavors.
Companies that invest in inbound marketing objectives are smart, but only if they go the extra step to make certain the campaigns own and command a solid strategy. Building and focusing on the driving details of a marketing campaign allows for powerful, wide-reaching messages to the right audience, and demonstrates exciting results. Avoid this marketing mistake and lay down a solid strategy so your company can end up with large, marketing-driven revenue hikes.
