6 Steps to Become a Marketing Strategist vs a Tactician

Radhika Sivadi

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As marketers we all share the same ultimate goal which is to gain top of mind awareness for our brand. When asking people to give a name of a very successful sportswear company it won’t be very difficult to guess what will be the first name that will come to mind for most people… Nike right? How about computers? Apple (wasn’t the same story a few years back).

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However, in trying to reach the goal of top mind awareness most marketers carry out the same mistakes by using old product data marketing tactics to sell their products and fail, as opposed to innovative market data marketing strategies the top 1% of marketers use to sell their products and succeed.

Below are 6 of the most successful strategies I’ve found along my endeavors to gain top of mind awareness for convertiFIRE.

1) Utilizing ROI-Driven Metrics

Bottom line, what gets measured, gets monitored. Nonetheless, its worth having in mind that measuring too many metrics can be very counterproductive thus meaning, focusing on a few key metrics is key to marketing success.

Many marketers sin by measuring every metric they have access to, rather than focusing on a few core metrics. Similar to the “Pareto Principle” less than 20% of your metrics account for more than 80% of your results, thereby establishing a clear focus on a handful of metrics is the most important factor in marketing analytics & insights.

The first step in making the shift towards becoming a marketing strategist is to analyze your current marketing funnel thoroughly by asking yourself the following questions:

  • What are the steps my customers go through in order to convert?
  • Where am I currently struggling the most?
  • How can I improve each step?

Next, make a list of all the metrics you want to measure and ask yourself: “What decision would I make differently after I’d get this number?” If you find it hard to come up with a clear cut answer, remove it from your list.

The most important thing to discern from the new age of marketing is, that if in the past marketing was a lot similar to what you’d see in “Mad Men” by making stylish creative ads for newspaper and magazines with no real data to back it up and thereby when the marketers excuse was that they can’t be held accountable for their marketing spends, in 2014, every dollar needs to deliver significant ROI in order to be justifiable.

2) Behavior-Based Marketing

The common misconception of most marketers is to assume they understand everything about their customers. The truth of the matter is, many probably do – to a certain degree. However, the best rule of thumb for us marketers is to acknowledge the fact that you’ll never know your customers better than they know themselves.

In our times, where big data analytics is increasingly playing a bigger role in our lives, there’s no reason whatsoever to try and guess how your customers will behave. At your disposal are tools like Google Trends and Social Mention to assist you in making intelligent, data driven decisions pertaining how your customers are behaving as opposed to how you think they’ll behave.

In addition, a data driven approach to marketing will often uncover new opportunities. By analyzing this data, you’d be able to establish actionable plans that impact pricing, features, sales, customer service.

3) Create an Optimized Customer Experience for Every Type of Offering

Increasing online lead conventions can’t be achieved by using a “one size fits all” approach to customer experience.

Thus meaning, your offerings should be fully optimized to match your client’s buying criteria in order for you to maximize your marketing ROI, which is virtually impossible to achieve by referring all of your traffic to the same homepage that will not, no matter what, match the desired customer experience of every single one of your offerings.

 The Good Old Tactician Tactics

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What The Top 1% of Marketers Do

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(Photos by convertiFIRE)

4) Learn to Speak IT

A) Explain Your Objectives

Brief your IT department about what you’re trying to accomplish in order to help them understand application requirements. IT will map your objectives to theirs and create a two-way checklist.

B) Handle IT Objections

This step is somewhat tricky. Your automatic reaction when your IT department tells you “no” is to simply ignore them. By contras, if you’d take a minute understand what’s causing the IT objection you will find out that most likely it’s an integration or security concern.

The best option you have in my humble opinion, is to simply bypass these objections by utilizing new technologies that don’t require any IT knowledge of integration to leave it all to the discretion of your marketing department.

5) Use Market Data vs. Product Data

Studies have shown that when trying to market a product for consumers, product data was found to be a lot less motivational than market data simply because consumers are a lot more motivated to buy a vision of what they’ll become vs. a list of benefits.

Example: If was trying to sell you a treadmill by telling you that its the best treadmill money can buy, it will last you more than 20 years, and you won’t ever regret buying it! Most chances are that you’d will skip my campaign ad after the 5th second on YouTube.

By contrast, stating something like:

“Did you know that by implementing one simple habit to your lifestyle you can decrease your chances of suffering from one of the following illnesses (heart attack, high blood pressure, high cholesterol etc… by more than 50%?! Find out how by clicking”

Then, in the next page show you medical research on the benefits of exercising to decrease your chances of suffering from these illnesses, and finally after you scroll down a little bit offer you a limited time offer of 40% discount on a brand new treadmill, do you think by now you’d more motivated to buy?… The answer is yes!

6) No Matter What, Don’t Be Afraid to Fail

Often times you might encounter a strategy that doesn’t produce the results you were hoping for. Sometimes, its only a matter of a few tweaks to get back on track. That being said, failure is inevitable. After all, by acknowledging that some strategies will unfortunately fail – no matter how much tweaking you do is the most important factor to distinguish when undertaking the risks to reach your marketing goals.

This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: 6 Steps to Become a Marketing Strategist vs a Tactician

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Radhika Sivadi