Why we always talk about strategy
Long days and late nights of proofreading, testing, and tweaking. Your marketing assets have cost you time, money and sleep. You’ve spent months working with agencies and designers to build content assets, write blogs, and design literature. Your website has been developed and it’s looking pretty impressive. You’re finally ready to share it with the world. You hit publish. Go live. Share… Things are looking good, initially. But a few weeks down the line they start to slow down. Engagement drops and traffic declines. More content is published, but it’s just not generating the leads you thought it would.
What’s the problem here?
This scenario is more common than you might think. Particularly in property marketing. It's likely that a vital part of your marketing mission was neglected: strategic marketing. You’ve heard us speak about functional marketing and strategic marketing - the ‘doing’ and the ‘thinking’ - many times before. And there’s a good reason for it. As this article from Marketing Week estimates, 90% of marketers never develop a marketing strategy - gasp. 90%! While that’s just an estimate, it does in fact highlight the perennial issue of declining strategy in marketing and communications.
Functional marketing
Of course, the ‘doing’ is incredibly important. Functional marketing seems to be where marketers spend most of their time. It’s where ideas come into fruition, and are executed into tangible communications. The ads, the SEO, the writing, the video editing etc. It’s satisfying to have an end product.
Talents can be harnessed to create impressive marketing assets that act as vehicles for communications with clients and prospects. This excites people. That might explain why marketing departments invest most of their time into functional marketing. But without strategic marketing, things are really left the chance once you share those fantastic assets with the world.
Strategic marketing
The strategy is the WHY. Why are you doing what you are doing?
This creates consistency and purpose. Strategic marketing will define the purpose of your marketing activity and act as the rocket fuel that ensures it performs effectively and has longevity.
Having a strategy in place that underpins all content, advertising, design and social activity will also ensure consistency across all of your channels. Social media messaging will align with blogging. Sponsored ads will be consistent with brand identity, and executing with a strategy will ensure you are speaking to the right people at the right time.
Creating a strategy is surprisingly simple, it just requires some complex thinking. Start with the following questions:
How are we performing right now?
You’ll need to get clear on numbers. If you can create a benchmark, you can set timely, realistic and specific goals as a part of your wider strategy. This will give you something measurable to aim for.
How do we define our audience?
Knowing your audience, who they are and how they think, will be one of the most important parts of your wider strategy. Whether they are segmented further is down to the nature of your individual business, but knowing your audience and how to position content will help you deliver marketing activity that speaks to them, and acknowledges their needs.
Who are our competitors?
Competitor analysis will allow you to pinpoint exactly who your competitors are and decide how you will position yourself within your space. How will you elevate your brand above them, and differentiate yourself within this particular market?
How will we measure growth?
If you want your marketing to deliver ROI, you need a system in place to measure growth. Capturing data and insights can strengthen your strategy as you move forward. A marketing strategy should be agile, and open to changes as dictated by this data and the current climate.
Strategic marketing will ensure you’re sending money to the right places, budgeting better and investing your time in marketing assets that will pay off. It will allow you to measure ROI, and growth, and identify when it’s time to reinvent the wheel.
Marketers are prolific beings. Anyone who has worked in marketing will know the multiple tasks and talents required of them. And it's their job to fulfil and deliver. But as we discovered in The Property Marketing Strategists’ recent research, most property marketing professionals do not report to board level seniors. Without access to the direction and mentoring needed to excel in marketing strategy, perhaps they aren’t given the space to develop this skill.
Without a comprehensive strategy, you’re leaving things to chance. Content marketing can be incredibly effective but without a strategy underpinning its creation and delivery, it might not hit the right prospects at the right time. Establishing your audience’s challenges and objectives and positioning your content to align with them is one way to supercharge your activity.
This is the relationship between functional and strategic marketing, and this is why it will be so vital to your success.
If you would like some advice or support with your marketing strategy please get in touch.