When you hear the word “Marketing”, what do you picture? An agency presenting branding and clever ideas to clients? An inside team churning content at the request of sales? Interns running social media accounts from their phones?
Marketing is all of this and more. While we can admire the slick videos and branding that scrolls past on LinkedIn or a competitor’s library of engaging content, identifying some of the key components of a basic marketing plan can help you increase awareness of your brand and turn that engagement into clientele.
Where to Start:
Gather all your assets. This includes logins to social media accounts and websites, case study’s, logo files, brand color codes, planned event schedules, published and draft articles and blogs and the core messaging and value point of your organization. Additionally, what tools and technology do you have (this is called your MarTech stack, and we’ll cover that in a future post)
Do an audit. Do these assets need to be updated, retired, or completed? Is all the branding up to date and consistent? Are there gaps? New products that need assets? A list of case studies or brochures that that sales has been requesting?
Identify your goals. Do you want to do a total rebrand? Do you just need your social media handled? Would an email DRIP campaign support your sales team? Do you need a way to generate inbound leads from your website?
Decide on your vehicles. Aside from in-person events (are we doing those again?), most marketing materials should be digital. How do you plan on managing that library? Who is going to create and own it? Do you have in-house capabilities, or do you need to outsource all or part of your marketing?
Once you have these items assembled, assessed, and decided, you can move onto the next steps: creating your marketing plan – or content calendar – and deploying. The exciting part about marketing is that no matter how you choose to execute, you are creating space to tell your business’s story and engage with potential clients.
Contact Channel Methods to learn how you can start or boost your marketing strategy. jillians@channelmethods.com
Recent post
