Strategy for Marketing Driven Decisions

It’s a sad truth, but unfortunately, managers don’t always comb through bad advice and practices that cloud their vision.

No, and these are smart people. Why would they make choices that defeat themselves? They know marketing generates sales but they choose mediocre solutions at higher prices. They buy into cheap, all inclusive, low hanging fruit solutions, and stayed glued to concepts they got sold on in years past. And market leader success remains elusive.

In the end, it comes down to how deep their commitment to themselves is.  Those business owners who take themselves most seriously become obsessed with their own vision and with those who will help them succeed. The rest become invisible.

Clarity: Sound Decisions Emanate from Taking Your Goal Seriously

In my experience, whether it’s agencies or sole proprietors, business managers are smart. You may be humble and you might even doubt it, but I don’t have any doubt that if you got where you are, you’re bright. Anyone I worked for was pretty smart.  But they got schooled in cutting corners and “official” reasons for hiring the mediocre person.

Looking back at my own poor business decisions, I can attribute disappointing results to not taking a need for success seriously and not choosing the best people who can get me where I want to go.

But by admitting that making that investment in pros is necessary, you’re overcoming procrastination, thinking clearly, and most importantly — taking yourself seriously. You can have a process, but if you don’t take the goal seriously, the process leads nowhere.  When my hotel client hired me, they just had an intuition that I was the one.  And I doubled their hotel website traffic. When someone has confidence in you, it can generate amazing outcomes.

Your own personal, conscious drive to succeed is the seat of wisdom. We need to understand why and own it. When we’re geared to success, we automatically make better choices.

Consider Tom Brady the football quarterback who after two decades of punishing football, has had his biggest successes in his 40’s.  From the first day at practice, it was all about this goal of greatness and how he was responsible for his success going forward, no matter whether he played for New England or Tampa Bay. His lesson is a good one.  Value success and let your drive for winning long term drive your decisions.

He told his boss he was going to be the best investment he ever made. He was exactly right. He’s now the GOAT (greatest of all time).

 

The success equation is: knowledge > confidence > commitment > strategy > allocation > performance > repeat.

 

Hindsight is 20/20

Let’s look at what doesn’t work and why:

  • insufficient planning, strategy and total respect for our own success
  • insufficient insight into what we really want and what we need to succeed
  • insufficient insight into what the market wants
  • lack of patience in creating a perfect fit between our offering and market preference
  • lack of commitment to marketing and to creating maximum significance to customers
  • focus on product quality when what the market actually wants is uncertain or not even important (beating the competition and making the market prefer our product is the real goal)
  • lack of assertiveness in marketing (guns ablazing will fix that)
  • lack of market awareness (research & immersion)
  • lack of knowledge of competitors weaknesses and our opportunities
  • lack of respect for competitors
  • not making market timing perfect
  • not taking enough time to build the business idea
  • not acquiring and committing the right marketing budget
  • not having a real system to evaluate your providers correctly (slick website pitches and MBAs don’t really mean anything, and you have to go way beyond that)

Okay, there’s a lot of success factors in business marketing. In being thorough to cover all of these items, you’re actually reducing your chances of failure to zero. Did you look at it this way? Did your management training tell you to look at it this way? Well, they likely teach that at Boys Scouts of American, so sometimes simple truths count.
Of course, erasing error potential doesn’t guarantee success, it just removes everything else.

To Choose the Right Provider

If you read my post on evaluating marketing agencies, you’ll recognize the emphasis on quality and fit. That applies if you know what you’re doing. Because then, it’s easier to see who can deliver the key services at a top notch level. Can you get a gourmet meal at McDonalds or Burger King? You’re likely to get the kind of cuisine experience you want at a 5 star waterfront restaurant which has a brand name Chef. He’s a specialist with his reputation on the line. He’s going to take care of you.

Digging Deep

Okay, so you’ve made the effort to get clarity on what you can offer the market against what they want. Here’s a good process to help you make good decisions:

  • clarify the marketing channels that will create short term gains in revenue and knowledge
  • clarify the marketing channels that will provide long term gains and knowledge
  • prioritize each channel based on the marketing/business phase you’re about to enter
  • remember your competitor’s weaknesses and where they’re giving you an opening
  • identify and prioritize that marketing assets you need to develop and who can create them
  • evaluate providers based on their top, specific skills that make a difference (low paid agency workers are a dime a dozen)
  • ask your contractors/specialists which marketing software tools they believe are most relevant
  • clarify the KPIs and benchmark goals you need to achieve
  • plan your digital marketing strategy, map it out in a flow chart and treat it as a project management case
  • you’re responsible for results, but make others accountable for execution
  • keep good communication, and let them know what needs to be achieved

The greatest thing about managing your marketing strategy is that you get to ensure it’s optimal. Of course, I’ve seen many business owners try to manage marketing and it didn’t go well. They were brilliant business people, but didn’t have a handle on marketing because it’s a different beast (it’s creative and requires imagination). You can’t succeed at marketing with a scheduling tool, or an agency that promises the moon, or by applying traditional business processes.

Success comes when you become a real marketing manager, and insist on the best effort from the people you can afford. They want to give the best effort, and you need to gather the right resources, tools and strategy to succeed.

Let the marketing strategy guide everything since it ensures the right resources at the right time.

Read more on military strategy for marketing to really drill into key competitive issues that you absolutely will confront. And begin with brilliant content strategy, powerful SEO services, and improve your conversion funnel.

Learn more about how AI Marketers Services can help your software company build a larger pool of customer prospects using search engine optimization as a key driver.

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