What are the advantages of having a marketing strategy?

There are two times in each year that Marketing Eye is inundated with calls from businesses both small and large seeking to re-think the way they market their businesses, how their marketing budget is spent, what resources they have on hand, and which technologies will help them achieve their goals.

As a well-known martech business, Marketing Eye has not only established a suite of marketing technologies that work seamlessly together, it has also utilized 15 years of marketing strategy data to create machine learning for Robotic Marketer, giving clients the advantage of industry best practices and proven data on highly effective marketing activations.

There are many advantages in having a marketing strategy, but none more so than now. With so many sales professionals selling everything from traditional media and public relations through to marketing technologies and new ways in doing campaigns, there is clutter and how marketers sort through the clutter is what will make the difference in the year to come.

People Technology = Advantage

There is no doubt that marketing technologies are game-changers however, did you know that only a small portion of people who buy marketing technologies actually use them. Companies always have good intentions, but when it is passed down the line, the technology application is often misused or not used at all. While the company keeps paying their monthly subscription, the technology sits there unused and ineffective. I am looking forward to the day when the technology solutions providers actually take account for the fact that so many companies don't use their technologies and find ways to make them more user friendly.

Bringing people along that journey is paramount and giving ownership for the results to key stakeholders assists in making good use of marketing technology that will ultimately help the company improve their brand performance and sales outcomes.

Marketing Strategies are research based

Forget gut instinct. Very few people can rely on their gut to get results time and time again. A one-hit-wonder is not a proven success story, and when that one hit is forgotten, your sales pipeline will feel the pinch. Investing in market research or technologies that produce the market research required for your company to understand your customers better, the market changes and what your competitors are doing, is critical. We have an in-house technology that digs deep into data to achieve a comprehensive marketing research report that allows us to better understand how to navigate the year ahead on behalf of our customers.

Business goals need to be aligned with sales and marketing

Having a marketing strategy allows businesses to think about the company's vision and align sales and marketing objectives. It also allows the company to re-visit their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, ensuring that they leverage the strengths and opportunities and work on the weaknesses while keep the threats front of mind.

Builds a strategic approach to brand awareness

Every company needs brand awareness. These days we find that few companies have not heard of Marketing Eye and that is simply because of our dominant online presence. Every company needs a strategy around brand awareness and a supporting brand story that emphasises their unique value proposition. 

Disciplined approach to marketing workflow and tasks

What a marketing strategy does well is organise the year ahead managing all aspects of workflow, resources and marketing tasks that are required to be done. We use Australian technology platform ASANA to manage the workflow of our business with great success. We simply could not live without it. By ticking off each task as it is completed and allocating marketing campaigns and activations to internal and external resources, the management of marketing and the support of sales teams is made simple.

Marketing professionals are able to accomplish these 5 key things through their marketing strategy:

1. Clarity: Marketing strategies are a clear blueprint of the company from a marketing perspective and includes the marketing objectives for the year, along with what marketing tactics need to be done to achieve the companies goals. Trying to remember these things is fruitless. Writing them just as tasks rather than any strategy behind it also leaves opportunities on the table and doesn't help with measurement of outcomes or alignment with sales. 
2. Data-oriented: We use Robotic Marketer to capture the data of our clients businesses, their competitors and the market, continually investing in data that from Google Analytics, Adobe Cloud, Alexa and more. This data is then used to ascertain what is effective and what is working, and what needs to be changed. It also helps us understand if a competitor has a spike in activity and how we can quickly adapt our marketing efforts to achieve capture mindshare.  
3. Discipline and focus: Adhoc marketing doesn't work in the long run. We know this. Running a marketing department with no direction, discipline and focus is one sure way to waste time, money and efficiencies.
4. Resources: There is no point in writing a small business marketing strategy for an enterprise level marketing budget. Won't work. Won't be relevant and definitely will be thrown in the bin as fast as it is produced. It is a common mistake external marketers make. Know your budget upfront, what marketing resources you have on hand and what additions you can add over the year based on performance levels. 
5. Alignment of sales and marketing: All stakeholders should be on the same page, pursuing the same objectives for the same reasons.

We are currently doing a huge push for our Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane operations and transforming our business to provide companies with more than just an outsourced marketing department. To achieve this, having a business plan, marketing strategy and sales plan in place allows for our entire team to have buy-in and work in a disciplined, yet creative environment with a firm eye on the prize.