Podcast Episode 8: The Importance of a Marketing Strategy
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[00:00:00] Hi everyone. I'm Pip from Seymour Digital Media. You're listening to Know How Marketing Lab podcast. This podcast brings together different experts in marketing from our Facebook group, Cyberpunk Geeks, Marketing Mixer. Each week we get on here and we talked about something search marketing like Google.
[00:00:18] Or seo, Social media marketing. From Facebook to TikTok or website marketing. If you're a marketer or aspiring marketer, a business owner or entrepreneur, this podcast for you, we're gonna share the best seo, search, social and website strategies. We share tips and hacks. Google ad strategies, what's going on in the current market.
[00:00:41] Each week we discuss something exciting and awesome in marketing. This is Rena Little from Little Works, Indie Media for Geek Speak. And Greg, do you wanna introduce yourself? Yes, I am Greg with Original 72 Creative and we're a full [00:01:00] service website, graphic design and digital marketing firm in. Perfect.
[00:01:04] And today we're heading into a topic that is super near and dear to my heart and my nerves actually , and that is, Marketing strategy. Yeah. The importance of a marketing strategy. I dunno. What do you wanna get into first? First I'd like to talk a little bit about why it's important and what happens when there isn't one.
[00:01:27] So basically, when you think about how to organize your marketing, there are two types of things that you wanna think about when a strategy. And one is tactics. And sometimes people get those two things confused. They'll say, Oh, I wanna run a bunch of Facebook ads and I'm gonna run some TikTok ads and I'm gonna send out a newsletter.
[00:01:46] Those are all tactics, but the strategy needs to be cohesive. And there are a couple of reasons for that. Do you want me to just jump in or do you have something to say? Yeah, go for it. Go for it. Ok, cool. So basically a strategy is how [00:02:00] you organize your tactics so that you're actually. Organizing your tactics to fulfill a particular goal.
[00:02:08] In your business plan or your sales goals, anything like that. So it could be sales goals, it could be maybe you're some an organization that sends out information and you're actually just getting the word out. Whatever that is, it has to of come from a top level. So your business goals usually turn into a marketing plan, and that marketing plan usually gets organized in the digital realm as part.
[00:02:32] Part of a bigger marketing plan. Cause obviously there are some things that you might be doing that are not digital, like speaking engagements or trade shows or things like that, brochures, the stuff like that. But what you want is to have everything cohesive for your yearly plan. Quarterly goals, your monthly goals, and there's a really good reason for that.
[00:02:53] It's not just so that you're organized and it's not just so that you might actually hit your goals or come in this in the [00:03:00] realm of your goals, but it's also because if you're doing everything as verticals and tactics, Then generally you can come into this situation where if you have one person looking after your Google Ads, one person looking after your website and one person looking after your social, and they're not communicating with each other and they don't have an overall plan, or they don't have an insight to your overall plan as a business owner, then you can have things like overlap, have tactics.
[00:03:29] So for example, a social person may be blogging for you with. Goal in mind. And then your SEO company might be blogging for you with a different tactic, like using it differently or a different goal in mind. So you might be doubling up on your services. You might also have big, huge gaps of things that aren't on your radar that you might wanna be doing that you're not doing because you don't have anyone looking over that nice plan.
[00:03:57] So while you want [00:04:00] specialists on each vertical, you might. Somebody looking after the complete plan. And it might be you as a business, a small business owner, and it might just be one of your team members, one of your service providers. Does that, do you have any questions about that? Yeah, no. What you were going on about was definitely, I'm on the same page for the exact, what you were talking about was if everybody is just working on their own and doing their own thing and don't have a cohesive plan.
[00:04:30] All their voices are gonna be projecting different for your business, and you don't want that. You want your vision and voice to be the same tone throughout everything that you do, whether it be online or offline. It's really important to have it. Now I have a couple of examples of how that goes wrong sometimes and what that looks like so people really get go for it.
[00:04:54] Good understanding. So for example, I think I spoke about this was part of my example. There was [00:05:00] one client that I had and ultimately when you have a cohesive marketing plan, you also have. A really nice, cohesive brand going at, which I think is what Greg was getting at with your voice at different voices and that kind of thing.
[00:05:13] It also, I impacts your branding and how your branding is perceived in the world. So in this one particular case, this was a real estate agent. They had us doing the social media. They had another company doing the SEO work. And so the, that company was blogging and their blogs were seo.
[00:05:34] Forward. So they were really organized according to keyword ranking, which meant that the content was less, less interesting, for example, or less relevant really. So for example, they wanted to rank in Vancouver for Vancouver events. That was their keyword that I could figure out from their blog. And it was November and they had [00:06:00] included events in Vancouver that had already happened.
[00:06:04] For Halloween, and then they had events that weren't coming up until February for Chinese New Year. So that kind of content is like a waste of keyword in a way for me, because it's irrelevant, bad reading, terrible user experience, and not good for your brand . And yeah, it also was lacking in branding because that company wasn't concerned about putting up a featured image.
[00:06:30] When we were doing the blogging for the social side, we were blogging for readers in addition to seo. We had a beautiful photo, we had a really nice article that was relevant, and we had all the keyword stuff. Organized keyword on page SEO markup and all that stuff. So their blogs were seriously contrasting to our blogs, which made for a really weird user experience on their website.
[00:06:54] And if people signed up for their newsletter or their RSS feed for the blog [00:07:00] post, it doesn't really make sense. And so that's that kind of, that's one example. And then, The other example that always comes up, especially with Google Ads, is that when you're working with your social person's gonna organize you in terms of what content do we wanna feature?
[00:07:18] What is our promotion? What is our goal for that month or quarter, whatever it is. And we'll be focusing on messaging around that in social. And then we found out that the. The Google Ads, people were focused on a completely different goal. Like they were actually not working at all with any of the content and landing page that we were featuring.
[00:07:40] And so it creates like this disruption, like if you're going to create a goal for your business and then you don't have one major aspect of your ads team working on that goal, then are you going to reach your goals. At all because social generally can't do [00:08:00] everything by itself. It's, it warms up audiences and it performs a big function in your funnel if you're organizing it that way.
[00:08:08] But Google ads are an excellent part of that, should be part of that same funnel, not doing their own thing, so the goals were not really. In that quarter. Whereas when I work with companies where we're actually using a coordinated effort, and it doesn't mean that I have to do all the work for my clients.
[00:08:27] I work very well with other service providers. Absolutely. But when it's a cohesive goal, then those numbers we can blow out of the park way better. Like we. Really succeed when we're all moving down the same path with the same branding, the same message, the same goal, and we can really help small businesses in a much more profound way when it's all cohesive.
[00:08:54] When it comes down to it. I think from my perspective, I feel like [00:09:00] people really want to be told. What they need to do. Yeah. And so the marketing plan will do that, right? There's no question in what everybody's doing if they know what the end. I was gonna try to get into a little bit of how to go about defining what your marketing plan should be or Right.
[00:09:27] Because you don't just these are my goals. There's typically things you could do, which is knowing your company inside it now, and what's your business summary? What's your company all about defining that and writing that. So that everybody in the business knows the mission of the.
[00:09:49] As well for that having a mission statement, having vision defining your vision, d defining defining the company values. All of [00:10:00] these types of things will help you in figuring out what your voice is and how everybody in the company will project as everybody goes off and does these little tasks to market.
[00:10:13] Everybody at the very beginning should really put something together about what their business is all about, who they're going after, those types of things. So that there's a base Yeah. To work from on defining the, of what your marketing plan is gonna be around the goals of the company. Yeah. So yeah, those are really great points for sure.
[00:10:39] And I like to ask my client for, Business plan or marketing plan if they've developed one at the beginning of each year. Do you have a new plan? , do you have a new plan? The other thing that you wanna hand off to your marketers and service providers of all kinds is your style guide. Because that's gonna give [00:11:00] really clear indication of what kind of visuals we're looking for in our branding.
[00:11:05] What's our palette? Our color palette. Usually you have your palette from your logos itself, and then you have a, an extra palette that you've used probably for your website and that you can use in your marketing, which fonts and and what your messaging is. So generally on the style guides, if there are things that you want to avoid, specific words like in the mark in the real estate space, I get asked not to use the word bubble ever for obvious reasons. And so you wanna make sure that all of your service providers know that so that they're not sending out ads that you're not necessarily seeing, and then you find out much later that you've broken some kind of rule.
[00:11:45] Lots of industries are regulated in terms of what they have to say and what they can't say. And and then clients, we usually. Build upon their brand as we go. So some clients, like if you're dealing with people [00:12:00] in the in, in different parts of the world, different. Gestures might mean different things and different words have different connotations.
[00:12:08] So you wanna have that all set down as you come across these things. Instances, that's usually how it happens, is we use something and then it's Oh no, we can't do that. So we make sure we put it on the style guide so that all the service providers understand and that should be updated. So that's, that goes hand in hand with your marketing plan.
[00:12:27] I feel the branding or style guide thing is something that's majorly lacking in a lot of small businesses. It's just one of those things that people don't really put importance on when they're starting their business. And I can understand that. Yeah, I can appreciate that. Like spending money on defining your fonts and your colors and stuff like that seem very much at the very.
[00:12:55] Something that is a waste. Yeah. When there are [00:13:00] other thingsm maybe that they deem more important. Yeah. But as your business grows, it becomes more and more important. Yeah. And one of the, one of the reasons I'm doing what I do today, Because prior to this I had a, another company with with staff and did mainly web and e-commerce sites.
[00:13:24] I realized that so many small businesses don't have this because every time we got a project, I would ask can you gimme me your logo? Can you, do you have, what are your colors? What's the style of your business? So that I could create Yeah. A website. Yeah. That matches your brand. Yeah. And nobody could give me anything, so I ended up always like defining it.
[00:13:51] For them accumulating that information, building the site, and then pushing them to move forward with what we created. Yeah. [00:14:00] And I just did that as part of our web design project with them. And then so when I left that business I was like, this is missing. Like I wanna be someone's full marketing department.
[00:14:13] Yeah. Where I can go in and I can tweak their logo, create their colors, give them that style guide. And help them with all of this stuff as well as just doing their website Yeah. And stuff like that. So I'm completely on board with the importance of having that mapped out as early on as you can. Yeah, I agree.
[00:14:36] Want to know more about seo? We've got a class for that. Our mission is to educate students about the right tools, techniques, and strategies to grow their businesses using the most UpToDate search engine marketing optimization techniques and tools. Find out [email protected]. Generally speaking, when people start [00:15:00] their business, you're right, the priorities are different.
[00:15:02] They need to get out and start making sales pretty quick. So they need a website. They might need a business card, and they need a logo, and those are the things that they're mostly concerned about, and that's correct. If you have a little bit bigger budget, getting that style guide organized is good because it also tells you.
[00:15:18] To use your fonts. So generally speaking, when you get your logo from your designer and designers, listen that because this is not really user friendly for the clients. What we do is we always make sure, usually what in your style guide, the first thing is your logo and the colors in your logo, and then.
[00:15:34] One thing that you notice is how to use position your logo. So it'll tell you how much space to keep around that logo so that it's not butt up against things. But then on the other hand, the designers provide the file package. And when I'm working with the new designer, before they hear my little rant, they inevitably export those files.
[00:15:54] From InDesign without any white space around them or empty [00:16:00] space, What do you call that? Transparent space around it to provide that buffer for the client. And then so you see them, they put their logo up on Facebook or they put it somewhere and their logo was right against all the edges. And it just, it's just makes me cringe.
[00:16:16] But yeah, so that's usually the first one is just the logo colors, the logo fonts, and how much space to put around that logo. And then from there you can add complimentary fonts for when you move to your building, your website, usually your website developer or. A designer will give you complimentary fonts that they're gonna use and the complimentary colors for your palette that go with your logo, because that's another rookie mistake is creating your website in the logo colors itself because you really want a logo to pop.
[00:16:49] You don't want it to be blendy in with the rest of your site. So complimentary colors is super important. Anyways, we don't wanna get too far down the design section cuz we have about 10 minutes left. [00:17:00] But we do wanna cover a couple more. What were the, there was another topic that we had on our strategy.
[00:17:05] It was what does it look like, the differences between tactics and strategies and what was our last point, Greg? For the most part, the business owner would develop the, all of these. Guides the the style guide and the, or well, on behalf of whoever they're contracting to do it. Talk about defining their company mission statement, and vision and values.
[00:17:32] business owner really should be the one that's creating that with. The help of the company potentially, when you say the company, the design company. What I would say is that a designer should walk a client through a business owner through that process, and there should be discussions on that.
[00:17:53] Usually there's, and most designers always do this, they do an intake form and they established the. The [00:18:00] personality of the brand during that intake form. Cause you'll ask clients things like, how do you want your customers to feel about you and what is your vision and what is your mission? So yes, definitely the business owner should be really involved in this unless they have somebody else that they've assigned to with this task that sometimes happens.
[00:18:18] But really the designer should be walking them through and then the next person who takes that branding document. So it might be a logo designer. Then it might be handed off to a website designer, and then the website designer will add the next layer of information on there because really a style guide can be as small as just the logo to start, and then it can grow to be a giant manual of branding.
[00:18:41] Like sometimes there are many pages directing every aspect of the company's brand, which would include things like customer service. How your people interact with people. For example, in my company part of my branding is I don't want anyone saying, No problem to a client instead of, [00:19:00] you're welcome or it's my pleasure.
[00:19:03] I don't the no problem come back or the, that kind of thing. So any of that kind of communication, forward facing communication goes in your branding guide. Yep. Now a couple of other things I can pop off that are important to getting. Good marketing strategy together would be analyzing your customers or defining your target customers.
[00:19:28] Yeah. As well as doing competitor research, both. Very valuable to know before you actually start creating your marketing strategy. Thoughts on those? Yeah, I do. So in my intake form, you always ask. Customers. And usually when a business owner is really new in their business, they really don't have this locked down.
[00:19:51] So for example, insurance brokers will always say everyone's my client. And it's Okay, that's great. And it's true to an extent, [00:20:00] but who are your ideal clients? Who do you want to target market to? Because while the dude down the. Needs insurance and it would be your advice that they get insurance.
[00:20:12] If they don't have a steady income and and they have a ton of debt load, then insurance is probably not gonna be at the top of their priority list. See? So it's not necessarily who are your clients, it's the better question is, who should we be targeting? Who are your ideal clients? And that's really important.
[00:20:31] And you can have many ideal. And in fact, it's, instead of creating a wide net and including all of your ideal clients in one grouping, it's, especially for digital, it's way better to have a really tight, understood target market for each type of client. So for example, for my business, I have my 24 week social media training.
[00:20:58] I know that [00:21:00] a lot of women like that, a lot of women entrepreneurs, a lot of solopreneurs, a lot of small businesses like that. So I'll have a target market for my solopreneur woman client. And I'll have a target market for my small business client. They might have a team and a location, and they're completely different.
[00:21:17] But I'm gonna market separately to both of those target markets. So definitely knowing, I think some people call them avatars. Your client avatars. Who are they? What's their demographic like really as specific as you can. Then that can really help, especially when you're dealing with a service provider.
[00:21:33] If you've already worked out that, then I can just go straight to targeting the ads to that and creating a new audience for those people. If I'm left up to my own devices. Generally with the experience that I have, I can come up with your target market and your avatar without you. But sometimes there are some markets, like for example, I was dealing with a tool company a couple of years ago, and he was like all about the white collar hobbyist.[00:22:00]
[00:22:00] And I'm like, Oh, I would've never thought of that by myself. So I know hobbyist for sure, but I wouldn't have pinned them into the white collar demographic necessarily. So that was a super helpful tip that the business owner really knew already. So that was, and I could just move forward with targeting them rather than taking the time to figure that out in my work.
[00:22:22] Yeah. One thing I was gonna say about as. Mentioned casting a wide net type of a thing as opposed to trying to niche down and really target the people who your business is really going for is the fact that if you're casting that wide net, you could be getting a lot of potential customers that aren't.
[00:22:48] Who you're really looking for. Yes. And the fact that these people really waste a lot of time. Yes. Cause you do have to. If they're reaching out [00:23:00] or you're reaching out to them and talking to them and it's not the person you're looking for, that's wasted time. Yes. So casting that wide net and getting a huge amount of people when only a handful of them will end up turning into clients Yes.
[00:23:16] Is wasting a lot of time and resources to deal with all those, and that's the importance of making sure you are target. The very specific people that the business is going after. That's right. And ad spend. So when you said resources, I just wanna clarify ad spend. That's actually ad spent because people understand ad spend money much better than resources.
[00:23:40] And you're right, because if you're casting a wide net, and even if you help yourself out by creating a self selection, a self opt out. So generally speaking, in the best way of marketing is to target. Your ads really specifically so that you're not getting a whole lot of traffic to your site and then a whole lot of drop off.
[00:23:59] You wanna [00:24:00] reduce that drop off traffic, and you do that by becoming more niche down in your targeting. And then you can also do a self selection. So on your landing page, You wanna actually be saying things like, I'm not a copywriter, so I'm just saying that this really roughly, But you wanna have things like, for example, for my, my training package with the female solopreneurs, I would actually say, Are you a solopreneur Who is?
[00:24:27] And if I'm only targeting women, I don't actually have to say, Are you a woman entrepreneur? I can just say, Are you struggling in this way to get more. And, do you have a you can actually help self-select, You can say, Have you been in business for a while? Or you can find some other way to help them self-select.
[00:24:48] Are you doing marketing on your own? Do you want training? So if I'm trying to put them in a training thing, then I'm like, If you haven't hit that point where you're subcontract, where you're contracting out, [00:25:00] Your marketing work, then this is the course for you. This is a solution for your problems. It's gonna get you on board faster.
[00:25:07] So you do that self-select. If you don't want people diy, then you might wanna have we've got this really great quiz on a engineer's website and it helps people. Navigate, which permits they need from the city. But it also tells them at the end of the quiz, you need to get this permit and you can do this on your own or you can hire just a regular contractor.
[00:25:31] You don't need a, you don't need an engineer. And on the other end it's you need this permit and we can help you get that book session discovery session with us. And so you funneled the people that require you for that. Into your book booking system and you funneled all of those other people, the DIY people back to the city and given them the answer of what they need, which is also really helpful.
[00:25:55] So you're also building goodwill with people that might need you in the [00:26:00] future. We're creeping up on half an hour here, but I'll, I wanted to recap. We've got to the point where you touched on budget as we talked about that wider net and blown a. People have wouldn't be clients.
[00:26:18] And so the importance of that marketing strategy, defining all of these things will ultimately help you target the right people and stay within your budget and not go over budget. With all of these other useless contacts that maybe in your fish net. Yeah. And when you actually have budget that's working for you, then you start to scale up that budget.
[00:26:43] If you want to open up that faucet bigger to get more clients in, or you can start doing things by, instead of wasting all of the money on one thing, you can start to. Add other verticals to your mix, which is always great because not [00:27:00] everybody is found in the same spot. Not everybody's on Facebook, let's just put it that way.
[00:27:06] Yeah we didn't even touch on that part of I guess we did. Defining your target customers and. And where they would be to decide on where you're start marketing dollars. Yeah. I'm almost feeling like we, now that we've gotten this far, we could probably do a part two on strategy and really get into sort of how part two, you're coming your way very soon.
[00:27:28] Let's that . So what's next week, Greg? Do you know? Oh yeah, I know, right? It's only because I don't have my browser up at the moment. Yeah, I'm looking, Oh, you know what? I have no. Okay. I don't have it open, okay. We'll, we have another topic next week. Yeah. Tune in and if you have, find out, it'll be a surprise.
[00:27:53] Yeah. And we are streaming live from the Facebook group, Cyber Marketing Geeks. If you want [00:28:00] to join us there, if you have any questions about strategy, put them in the comments, polo, and we'll be happy to address them in. Part two, and we'll also leave you an answer as a reply and join us next week.
[00:28:12] Thanks everyone. Thanks. Bye-bye.
[00:28:15] The conversation never stops in our Facebook group, Cyberon Geeks. Join us at facebook.com/groups/cyber punk geeks to ask your questions, meet new friends, and learn even more about search social. Sites.
