Marketing is often cast as being costly and noisy, mostly because marketing is often, um, costly and noisy. Too many marketing departments—and the professionals who staff them—get stuck in reactive loops or PowerPoint hell or [your personal organizational timesuck here].
So, yeah, it can all get to you. Most businesses find initial success with pre-existing relationships and then plateau or worse. That’s when they engage marketing professionals, with the goal of building a funnel to fuel growth.
So how do the smartest and most successful businesses avoid the common marketing pitfalls?
It’s a question we get asked a lot, especially at initial meet-and-greets with potential clients. Our answer, at this point, is based on our work bringing strategic marketing capabilities to growing companies in a myriad (primarily B2B) verticals. Specifically, we’ve identified four marketing fundamentals that deliver scalable, predictable, and measurable results. These are them (with bonus parentheses):
Establish a (transparent) reporting framework: There are a million ways to spend money on marketing, but how do you know if your dollars are working? The best systems track marketing efforts like SEO, events, content and more all the way down to the wins—and, in so doing, offer actionable insights. We don’t recommend huge tech stacks, but every firm needs marketing automation and a CRM system that talk to one another so you can determine how leads are progressing through the funnel.
Create a (resonant) voice: We’ve seen too many companies get stuck telling their founding story rather than evolving their messaging and communication. Potential customers want to understand why your product or service is relevant for their story. They want to quickly and easily understand what you do and why it will add value. These two aspects should translate to each touchpoint along the prospect journey, from social posts to your website to your sales presentations.
Optimize performance (via the right channels): Spraying the world with random ads is a waste of time and money. You want to show up where your customers live, whether that’s LinkedIn during the morning, Facebook in the evening, their email inbox at 12:37 PM or any other node in the space-time continuum where the right target will engage with your content.
(Speaking of which) Create relevant content: In our experience, some businesses don’t value quality content at all and some get way too precious about every comma, period, and jargon-filled reference. To be successful, you need to find the sweet spot between spewing out bad (most) ChatGPT-generated posts and highly technical deep dives. Focus on developing a steady (but not overwhelming) stream of content that is engaging and valuable to your target audience.
Experience tells us that adherence to these four building blocks will help you build an acquisition model that enables you to know the cost at each stage of funnel activity, thus allowing you to make informed choices about how much and where to spend those precious marketing dollars.
Because if nothing else, we want to make marketing less noisy and costly (and more effective).
For more about 100 YARDS, contact us here.
