With more specialized marketing agencies, you may find the risk is that the ‘product’ you are offered is already predetermined. When you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
As a white label marketing agency, we consider marketing an objective process: fulfill your objectives, and the tools must come second.
I invite you to consider the 5 Essential Elements of marketing that we feel suit every business objective. Your mix may vary depending on maturity of your business, as well as your marketplace, and the type of services you offer:
Essential #1: Brand Building
Your brand needs a lot of room to breathe, it’s a big idea that demands creative initiatives to get it across to your marketplace, and carve out a place in their awareness.
Powerful communication is essential to convey your brand properly. Brand-Building is distinct in that it drives awareness to raise the profile of your company (‘push’), but also calls upon your audience to tap into their desires and see themselves in what you offer (‘pull’).
Digital marketing has some unique advantages in this arena; many of the tools of digital media exploit ‘permission marketing’, using channels that people are already listening to, presenting brands in a context that is not an interruption.
Essential #2: Customer Acquisition
Customer acquisition is always a prime objective. It’s arguably why you market your company at all.
Whether it’s online sales, lead generation, or walk-in traffic, businesses need to build attention for visibility in-market, move your audience to become a visitor, and motivate new visitors to convert to customers.
Managing this ‘pipeline’ is individual to the business. It requires a deep knowledge of your audience, their desires, and which will be the best match for you as customers.
The tactics and tools to acquire these customers always comes from knowing them. Online, there are many opportunities to explore, gain insight and discover what will drive results for you.
Essential #3: Client Retention
Engage your clients and inspire attention and loyalty – designing strategies that leverage your existing customers for expanded results.
It’s a given that your existing customers require the least cost to convert to a new purchase – making them your most productive ‘new customers’.
The challenge is to design creative ways to address your existing audience. To ‘reward’ their loyalty, encourage participation, and increase your ‘mindshare’ in your audience – to frankly, crowd out the competition and keep your top-of-mind consideration with your customer base.
Loyalty holds the potential to deliver powerhouse results for your marketing budgets – keep your gains, and expand your base.
Essential #4: Media Relations
Ultimately you want to build purchase influence with your audience, managing perceptions of your company and brand, especially among influencers and media organizations.
Media Relations have an unparalleled multiplier effect on your marketing efforts. Reach well beyond individual opinions, to find influential networks.
With finely-tuned media relations strategies you can tap into ‘influencers’, such as journalists and respected community voices. This generates press mentions, and accomplishes wider uptake of your expert content and expertise.
When you are a welcome voice, and a respected source, you become a default choice for potential customers.
Essential #5: Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence (BI) allows you to stay in the game and receive a flow of insights to keep you ahead of the competition.
A disciplined analytic approach gives you considerable competitive advantage from many sources: digital marketing has access to a lot of data, the challenge is to take data, and turn it into knowledge,
From knowledge, mine the information to distinguish insights: powerful Business Intelligence.
What are you doing right? What are you doing wrong? Are you measuring what you need to even make that determination? How can you turn incremental learning into steadily improving business results?
As you can tell by the question marks – it’s an inquiry, but an exciting one.
That inquiry makes you an expert in delivering value – and feeds back into every other one of The Five Essentials. It’s your key advantage – to be a powerful listener to what your market is trying to tell you.
