Business leaders need to promote their company’s brand, protect its reputation and grow its revenues against the backdrop of continued uncertainty. What’s the best way to develop a marketing and communications roadmap when the route ahead for most businesses remains challenging?
Plan your strategy
Start with your business objectives and build your marketing and communications plan to help get you there. Whether you’re about to launch, scale or expand into new markets, you need a robust plan to achieve your objective. The plan will reflect the industry you’re in, whether you’re selling to other businesses (B2B) or consumers (B2C), and the size and scale of your business.
First, consider who you’re targeting and where they are, both geographically and digitally. Conduct market research to understand the customer or industry you’re selling to and create a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional description of your ideal customer that ultimately helps you understand their wants and needs. Your market research should also consider your competition, what they do well, and where the gaps are that you can potentially fill. In addition, analysis of traditional and social media can help you understand the trending topics that your customers and prospects care about. This information will help you plan how to reach, engage and convert your prospects. It will inform how you develop your marketing approach, decide on your channels and media, and create your marketing content.
Master your approach and focus on content
There are numerous frameworks to help organise your marketing and communications approach. The “PESO model” is a useful tool for planning activity across different channels and types of media. The acronym refers to paid, earned, shared and owned channels. These terms correspond to advertising, public relations, organic social media, and proprietary marketing assets, such as your website, email campaigns or case studies.
Use the channels that are best suited to your product, service or campaign. A B2B firm marketing a complex service might use earned media, such as public relations, to build credibility within its sector. It might combine this with owned media, such as an email campaign, to target prospects. However, a B2C may rely heavily on paid media, in the form of TV or social media advertising, to generate a high volume of awareness and interest in a consumer product.
But you’ll need strong content to feed the process and ensure it works effectively. Think of content as an asset you provide to prospects in exchange for their attention, awareness and consideration. Instead of just pitching your products or services, you’re providing useful content to your audience. This could be to help illuminate solutions to their problems, inform or educate them about topics they care about, or inspire and entertain them in ways they find interesting.
In creating content, consider the customer needs you’re addressing and what’s distinctive about the way you address them. Reflect on the insights from your market research, media analysis and social listening. Bring these perspectives together to flesh out topics, and then individual content pieces, that are valuable to your audience and relevant to your business.
Make sure to measure progress and iterate your approach as you go along. A myriad of marketing and communications software providers can help you do this, such as Hubspot and Salesforce. Their tools can be used to stay organised and on track across the full range of marketing, communications, sales and customer service activities.
Build the right team
Marketing and communications teams are increasingly tasked with doing more with less. They have to work across a broader array of marketing disciplines than ever before and cut through the noise despite increasingly crowded markets. You may need to assemble marketing talent across user acquisition or lead generation, public relations, brand, creative, events, research and analytics.
The mix of specialisms will depend on your company’s stage of growth and whether you’re in B2C or B2B. Teams in B2C often focus on direct user acquisition, growth and scaling using advertising as well as non-paid, organic acquisition, such as search. Whereas in B2B, the emphasis is more likely to be on content marketing, lead generation and sales enablement during a complex and lengthy procurement process.
It’s rare for a marketing team to be good at all the marketing disciplines, except at the very largest organisations. Different marketing specialisations require different mindsets, skills and sensibilities. So it’s critical to determine which marketing discipline is dominant for your business, and then hire the right talent as your business evolves.
Getting strategy, content and team right is crucial to chart an effective course for marketing and communications. It will enable you to speak directly to your ideal customer’s pain points, create messaging and content that’s fit for each channel, and move prospects successfully through the buyer journey.
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