Beware Using Tactics Without a Strategy for your Digital Marketing

Transactions Come in All Sizes & Shapes and Are All Motivated by Customer Pains and Where They Are in Their Buying Cycle

Understanding the motivation of your most valuable target personas is essential to developing the strategies needed to define tactics to execute. Marketing or advertising without considering these crucial factors is like using a bowie knife instead of a scalpel to do surgery.  It’s messy and it doesn’t always produce the results you were looking to achieve.  In addition, it’s most likely not repeatable and certainly can’t be refined.

When you boil it right down, both marketing and advertising are based upon trying to create transactions.  Be it simply getting a prospect to click on a specific link, fill out a form, convert to a lead, make an ecommerce transaction, or simply visit a site or offer… Each in its own way is a transaction.

First, you must start by understanding who your customer is, the intensity of the pain they feel, what will motivate them to choose your product or service, and the steps each consumer (B2B or B2C) takes from Awareness to Purchase. Their Customer Journey.

The Most Common Mistake – “I Just Want to Advertise”

Believing that a single tactic (i.e. a YouTube Channel/Video, PPC, SEO, Display, etc.) or platform (Social, Search, Display) alone will help your customer is “…the noise before the defeat.” Using Isolated tactics is a waste of money and won’t get you the results you need. Taking a consultative strategically integrated approach backed by data generated by campaigns allows you to create and validate proof points along the path to success.

Like never before, today’s digitally driven marketing landscape offers the most complete view of a customer’s journey to a transaction. Expertise combined with data-driven execution is the basis for the dominance of digital and data-driven marketing results. It’s like developing a mathematical algorithm custom to your specific customer’s pain points and needs that produces the type of transactions you need to get results.

Proper Digital Marketing is an Integrated, Interdependent Discipline that Can Produce Measurable ROI.

In a lot of ways, it’s like a math equation.  The end result requires a thoughtful approach to specific variables.  Executed in the correct order and proof points along the way to validate the answer/s. simply put: Insight + Audience = Results

Solving for Rs: If “I” is Insight, “R” is research, “M” is messaging, “C” is creative, “D” is Data, “A” is the audience, “T” are tactics and “P” are platforms, “F” is the frequency of messaging presented to a targeted audience, “Tr” is the transaction, “Rs” is the results needed to achieve the goal.

(I = (R+D) = A + M x C) + (T+P x F)) = Tr + D = Rs

Insights (web stats, data, or research) alone don’t matter if you don’t know how to execute them.  Gathering an audience around a disconnected marketing message/ad, a video on YouTube, or blog post/email that isn’t relevant to them — isn’t going to work either.  It’s only when you take actionable insights and combine them with an ability to reach a target audience that will you get the results you need.

For any marketer or advertiser to achieve results that matter most requires a complex set of strategies and tactics designed around a fluid set of variables to produce the desired transaction/s. Then you rinse, refine & repeat reinvesting the learnings of past performance to yield future improvements.  If performed in this manner then each marketing effort can not only show the ROI it produced, but it can also be refined accordingly to produce the results needed.

No longer should a business (big or small) wonder which parts of their marketing is working, and which aren’t.  Gone too is the belief that Sales and Marketing are not interdependent and interconnected.  Done right – the two are genuinely one.