plan – Tonic Consultancy

11th April 20230

Rise Of The Machines! Will AI Replace Human Marketers?

There has been a lot of buzz around the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing recently and in many other industries. There’s talk about how AI bots such as ChatGPT will revolutionise marketing and sales, and even how AI could replace digital marketers.

But while the use of AI in marketing has been increasing, there is not a lot of information or data about how it could impact digital marketing in the coming years, as well as tech industry leaders calling for a slowing down in the development of AI.

So Why Is AI Looking Attractive To The Marketing Industry?

Marketing can involve collecting and analysing massive amounts of data, and AI can mine this data and better apply it to advertising and marketing. As many organisations gather more specialists in data science, the concept of using AI for marketing automation becomes increasingly appealing.

But will AI replace human marketers? Before any marketers begin throwing their virtual clogs into the machinery of AI like the 15th-century Dutch textile workers fearing automated looms would cost them their jobs, let’s take a closer look.

What Is Marketing Automation?

One of the immediate benefits of using AI is its ability to automate certain tasks, thus streamlining certain processes and more effectively measuring the outcomes faster and with less effort.

AI can identify patterns faster, leading to more accurate predictions to help with marketing strategy planning, better use of marketing staff, and saving time and resources.

But as to whether AI will replace real human marketers? The short answer is no. Certainly not yet, and it maybe never will.

AI certainly will prove to be useful, but marketing will always rely on creativeness, inventiveness, and originality when it comes to finding ways to better connect with audiences and customers.

Digital marketing will always need that human touch. Marketing requires storytelling and emotion, which AI will never be able to master or emulate. But despite a reliance on the human element, it may be a fact that we will all have to accept that roles in digital marketing will change over time, just as marketing roles changed with the digital revolution.

AI will lead to an evolution in marketing roles as we begin to understand it better and how to better utilise it to provide better digital experiences.

What Can AI Currently Do?

AI can be used to enhance and simplify aspects of marketing campaigns, as well as help reduce mistakes and promote productivity. Some of the tasks that AI can currently do include:

Automate routine and repetitive tasks – AI can be used to partially replace humans in some everyday repetitive tasks and processes, such as content curation (not creation), PPC as management, and replying to certain emails.

Compilation and analysis of large data sets – AI can be programmed to learn from experience and then more easily tackle large data sets which is typically a laborious task for humans. AI can recognise patterns quickly across data sets, provide predictions based on detected patterns, provide valuable insights about your customer base, and even predict future customer behaviour.

Create digital assistants – Many websites now use digital assistants, such as chatbots which can help give 24/7 customer service, albeit with limited capabilities.

Save time and increase productivity – The implementation of AI can save marketing departments valuable time and resources, which then leads to higher productivity, as marketers have more time to spend on creative tasks and more difficult tasks that need a human touch.

Allow for experimental pilot schemes – some marketing companies have been experimenting with AI by letting it write advertisement copy, banner ads, and email subject lines, conduct digital ad buying, and create buyer personas.

It shows that there is a lot of potential for AI in digital marketing, as long as it is seen as a beneficial tool and not the T-800 Terminator sent back from the future by Skynet to take your job.

What Can’t AI Currently Do?

However, it will be a relief to know that there is still so much that AI cannot do, particularly when it comes to marketing and the human touch. Let’s have a look at what AI is incapable of doing:

Operate individually – AI is a machine, and it requires programming by humans, as well as needing to be continuously updated, and just like the everyday tech in your office, AI systems will need to be replaced when they become obsolete or the needs of the industry change and evolve.

Be creative – No technology can replace the human capacity for creativity or creative problem-solving. AI will always be limited to the data with which it is provided, and only able to draw conclusions from that data. It can’t properly edit photos, write original music, invent anything, or come up with fresh ideas.

Have emotions – AI cannot perform, show, or transmit emotions, meaning it can’t turn emotions into meaningful content that your customers can relate to along their buyer’s journey.

Make human connections – without emotions, AI cannot form genuine human connections. AI cannot be programmed to show empathy or be able to understand cultural and moral concerns.

Critical thinking – AI can excel in gathering and analysing data, but when it comes to developing strategies, it lacks the critical thinking that all humans possess.

How Can Marketers Evolve With The Introduction Of AI?

There is much that marketers can do to grow and evolve alongside the introduction of AI and make sure they keep one step ahead of the impending robot threat know how to utilise AI to their advantage.

Keep up-to-date with AI news and trends – keeping abreast of the latest development in AI in digital marketing will mean you will best know how to leverage it to your advantage. Knowledge is power, and power is knowledge.

Recognise the replaceable skill sets – Identify the skill sets that could be replaced in the future by AI, such as those routine and repetitive tasks and processes that are inevitably time-consuming and boring.

Determine which skill sets will never be replaced – Recognise which skill sets AI will not take over, such as non-repetitive, creative, and critical thinking skills. If you have experience in these, then turn your focus towards them.

Be prepared to adapt – You won’t be able to stop the impending wave of changes due to AI, but you can determine how they may affect you and how to adapt.

Be versatile – Ensure you keep your skill set up to date, and train on new technology and the latest strategies as they become available to remain versatile.

In Conclusion

AI isn’t coming for your job, but even without AI, industries and jobs evolve and change, and it’s important to remain aware and involved. Ensure you create value in yourself and your marketing skills.

At Tonic, we know the importance of the human element in marketing, so if you’re looking for the personal touch, outstanding client services, and a passion for results, talk to us today.

Blogs, Digital, Marketing Plan, Out of home

6th February 20230

A Guide To Marketing Terms For Beginners

Whether you’re getting your start-up venture off the ground or seeking to grow your established company, marketing is an essential part of every business. But if you’re not a marketing professional, there can be an awful lot of acronyms and terms flying around, and trying to keep up can make your head spin!

But don’t worry, if you don’t know your CTA from your CMS or your buyer persona from your brand awareness, we’re here to help! The number of terms and acronyms seems to grow every day, but we have compiled some of the most common terms, abbreviations, and concepts into a handy glossary for you.

Basic marketing terms

Lead

A lead is a potential buyer who has engaged with a brand previously and has a likelihood of making a purchase in the near future.

Content
Content refers to any piece of information that has been created to be seen by an audience, and typically includes blog posts, email newsletters, social media posts, videos, and direct mail.

Infographic

Infographics are a type of content (see above) that presents statistics, data, and other information
in an easy-to-understand and well-designed image.

Analytics

Analytics in marketing is the process of analysing data so that the ROI (return on investment – see below) of a specific marketing activity or campaign can be determined. Marketers also use the term analytics when referring to the dashboard or system they use to track and review this data.

Brand

A brand is how a company is perceived and experienced by an audience and customers. Branding – the elements of a brand – include its logo, design elements, and the tone of voice used when interacting with customers and its target audience.

Buyer persona

A buyer persona is an imaginary customer that marketers target when they are developing ads, campaigns, and content. Buyer personas are not actual people but are built from the data of real customers. Marketers use these buyer personas to help inform the audience, tactics, and tone of the message they are wanting to convey.

CTA (Call To Action)

A CTA is a prompt that aims to encourage website visitors to perform a certain action, whether that’s to subscribe to a newsletter, submit a contact form, or make a purchase. A CTA is typically used to help guide a customer to the next step in the sales funnel (see below).

Customer journey

Rather than it describing the bus ride into town to your retail outlet, in marketing, a customer journey is a phrase used to describe the process from when a customer first shows interest in a product or service to the point at which any interaction is completed.

B2B

B2B is marketing shorthand for business-to-business. A B2B company markets its products or services to other businesses.

B2C

B2C is marketing shorthand for business-to-customer. A B2C company markets its products or services directly to the end consumer.

Engagement

The relationship developed between marketers and customers is referred to as engagement. In digital marketing, engagement can be measured as actions a visitor makes online, for example, clicking on a link or posting a comment on a blog or social media post.

Qualified lead

This is the name given to an individual that marketers have decided is a viable prospect when it comes to marketing a product or service. This is determined when marketing efforts have found that this individual has shown interest in the product or service.

ROI (Return On Investment)

Marketing campaigns require an initial investment of time and/or money, and the ROI is the metric that measures whether marketing efforts have earned enough money to be worth the initial investment.

Sales Funnel

A sales funnel refers to the buying journey that potential customers take before they make a purchase. The sales funnel includes multiple steps, from the initial discovery of a brand right through to becoming a loyal repeat customer.

USP (Unique Selling Proposition)

Your USP refers to what exactly it is that makes your product or service stand out from the competition. This could be a unique feature of your brand or product, its superior quality, pricing, or more.

On-site content

This refers to all of the content that a company has produced and shared on its website. It is designed to provide a potential customer to your website with the best experience possible while visiting your website.

Off-site content

Conversely, off-site content is all the content that is shared away from a company’s home website and designed to be eye-catching and help draw a potential customer to the company’s website, product, or service.

Campaign

A campaign is a set of marketing activities that have been designed to achieve a specific goal, for example, increasing sales for a particular product or increasing awareness of a product or service.

Brand awareness

This refers to the extent to which a potential customer is familiar with your company, and the distinct images and qualities – the branding – that are associated with your company, products, and services.

Types of marketing

Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing makes use of content and social media marketing to help attract new customers. This is the opposite of pursuing customers with the ‘hard sell’ or outbound marketing (see below), as inbound marketers develop relationships with an audience by meeting them where they are already in the purchase process, ideally, drawing them in to learn more about the brand.

Outbound marketing

This is the more traditional ‘hard sell’ type of marketing that tries to get the attention of potential customers by interrupting their daily lives with cold calling or direct mail campaigns.

Social media marketing

This is a digital marketing method that leverages various social media channels to help create brand awareness (see above) to help develop a relationship via regular interaction.

Email marketing

Content sent via email to current or potential customers who have subscribed to a marketing email list is email marketing. You’ll likely have received half a dozen of these by the time you’ve finished reading this article!

Content marketing

This is a marketing method that is centred on creating interesting, relevant, and consistent content to help attract new leads and convert them into becoming customers. See ‘content’ above for examples of what is used in content marketing.

Omnichannel marketing

Omnichannel marketing is the process of integrating all the different forms of marketing used by a company to make sure that a customer receives a consistent brand experience across all the various channels.

WOM (Word-of-mouth marketing)

Widely considered to be the most effective form of marketing, WOM is the oral or written testimony of a product or service from a satisfied customer to a potential customer.

Digital marketing terms
Landing page

A landing page is is a webpage optimised for lead generation. It is a stand-alone website page that will typically include a strong CTA (see above) or a lead magnet (see below) as part of a marketing campaign, such as offering a discount in return for providing customer information such as an email address.

Chatbot

Chatbots are automated tools now found on more and more websites and are usually used to address common customer questions. By scanning chat messages from customers, chatbots can identify potential keywords (see below) and topics of interest to be able to provide pre-populated messages. If needed, chatbots can escalate enquiries to a human representative.

Keyword

Keywords are words or short phrases that are entered by users into search engines to help find
relevant information. Digital marketers can then incorporate these keywords into web pages and
content to help boost their website’s visibility in search engines – see SEO below.

Bounce rate

This is a metric that shows the percentage of visitors who left the website after viewing only one
page. A high bounce rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can be a sign for marketers to adjust
their websites so that visitors are enticed to stay longer and see more of the site.

CTR (Click-through rate)

The CTR is a metric that measures how many people click on an ad when they see it.

CMS (Content Management System)

A CMS is a type of web publishing tool that is designed to manage the content that marketers have created for their websites.

UX (User Experience)
UX is the design process of making a website or app easier for visitors to understand and navigate.

Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is an incentive for potential customers to provide their information, such as a discount code or a free eBook download.

Clickbait

We’ve all seen clickbait on social media, where content creators try to manipulate individuals to get them to click a link. It typically uses provocative titles to pique the interest of viewers. Marketers Use This One Weird Trick That Will Instantly Boost Your Engagement!

Social proof

This is a psychological phenomenon in which people are more likely to trust a brand or make purchases if they have seen positive reviews or news from their peers on social media.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

SEO is the process of using keywords and other strategies to help boost the visibility of a website to search engines and increase the likelihood of a website or specific web page being among the first shown in a list of each engine results.

An ever-growing list

As mentioned, the number of terms and acronyms in marketing continues to grow, and like many trends, some will stick around, while others may simply vanish before they gain any traction. But we hope we have helped clear up some of the most common forms of marketing lingo for you here.

If you’re looking for no-nonsense marketing and don’t want to feel left out of the loop when growing your business, then come and talk to Tonic today!

Audience research, Blogs, Digital, Marketing Plan

4th January 20230

Why You Should Use LinkedIn As A B2B Marketer

When marketers are considering which social media platforms to use for their businesses, many will automatically head for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. But when it comes to generating B2B leads, then the most powerful social media platform has to be LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is possibly the most important social network for marketers to be able to reach business buyers and connect with professionals and has become one of the major social media platforms for B2B media and content marketing.

When looking at the Monthly Active Users (MAU) of the popular social networks, LinkedIn, with 310 million MAU may not be the biggest platform available, compared to 330 million MAU on Twitter, one billion MAU on Instagram, or a massive 2.7 billion on Facebook.

But the LinkedIn audience is one of the most lucrative ones for B2B marketing.

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram can become noisy and crowded, and while LinkedIn was once much quieter, it has become busier. However, unlike Facebook, where people go to connect with friends and family, watch funny videos, or post irreverent content, LinkedIn is the place where people go to network with like-minded people within their industry.
If you are looking to drive qualitative B2B traffic to your website or blog, then LinkedIn is the platform for you. The social network allows users to build relationships, establish thought leadership, generate B2B leads, gain insights, improve a brand’s reputation, conduct market research and help to build online communities.

LinkedIn now has over 875 million members, from 200 countries all around the world, and members can interact with each other, share their views, and boost their professional profiles.

It is a powerful social media platform that allows professionals and businesses to easily connect, boost brand identity, and engage in B2B marketing, and it should be part of any comprehensive social media strategy.

Using LinkedIn for marketing can be an effective way of raising for brand or business’s profile, if it’s done right. Overly ‘salesy’ marketing methods are typically not well received, and businesses that achieve success on the platform tend to leverage their industry expertise and knowledge to set themselves up as thought leaders in their field.

What is LinkedIn marketing?

LinkedIn Marketing is the process of using the social media platform to promote businesses or individuals and draw attention to their profiles. Not only can individuals create their own profiles, but business can also establish their own company pages, and subpages for specific departments or products, on the platform, which they can use to:
Build brand awareness
Drive traffic to websites or blogs by sharing content
Create new connections or continue to develop existing business relationships.

Let’s have a look at six reasons why you should be using LinkedIn in your marketing efforts.

Create awareness and improve reputation

It has been estimated that more than two professionals sign up to LinkedIn every second, meaning that businesses have an increased opportunity to be able to network with an increasing number of diverse interesting contacts. It means that LinkedIn is the ideal platform to help boost your online presence.
By making use of the different personal and group features on the platform, businesses and the people representing them can improve their visibility and credibility.

The status update functionality is an underutilised feature that should not be forgotten about, however, the latest design means that updates are more prominent on the homepage.

Thought leadership and influencer marketing

Several features on LinkedIn allow users to position themselves as thought leaders. As well as providing high-quality content, you can improve your personal profile and participate in LinkedIn communities to answer questions.

The platform is ripe for thought leaders and can lead to businesses and individuals becoming trusted advisors. Leadership and reputation go hand in hand with influence, and with the main purpose of the platform being networking, it can help you to identify and engage with other influencers.

Generating leads

Of all the social networking platforms, LinkedIn is probably the best for lead generation. As well as traditional marketing techniques such as providing content that potential customers can download or driving traffic to blogs and websites, LinkedIn offers personal ways of helping to identify leads, engaging with them, and converting them into customers.

This can be achieved through a combination of listening, analysing, participation, sharing information and content, networking, and responding. Finding potential customers on the platform and networking and marketing to them indirectly through LinkedIn will boost the opportunity to make sales and increase revenue.

Potential and existing customers are likely to post questions and needs. Group-related posts and questions allow B2B marketers to identify new leads, while shared and liked content will give marketers insight into what LinkedIn users find interesting.

By providing answers to questions on the platform, it is possible to demonstrate your expertise and knowledge. If your answer to a question is what a potential customer is looking for, then they will likely initiate contact.

Social CRM

In a CRM (customer relations management) context, LinkedIn is ideal; it allows for a better view of prospective customers and other contacts and can be done by using Social CRM applications and other connectors such as Outlook.

While most Social CRM applications provide integration with LinkedIn, you can also set up a basic integration of your contacts as LinkedIn has support for Google Contacts.

The main benefit of using a social CRM tool is that you are then able to see what your contacts are doing on LinkedIn in real-time, which provides valuable insights and information on their behaviour and preferences.

Traffic building

One of LinkedIn’s strengths, which can often be forgotten about, is its power in link building and traffic driving.

Just as with most of the other social networks, LinkedIn has a social sharing button so you are able to share content in your status updates, which are visible on the homepage, and in LinkedIn Groups – the communities of which you are a member.

This can prove particularly useful for business-related content and can lead to viral content status. Business-related content is far more likely to be shared on LinkedIn than on Facebook, for example.

Listening and gaining insights

LinkedIn is the ideal place to listen, ask questions, and gain insights, which is the case for all social media marketing. Take time to engage with your contacts, ask questions as well as answer them, and pay attention to what people are saying, posting, and asking.

Need help with your LinkedIn B2B marketing?

Here at Tonic, we know the ins and outs of marketing on LinkedIn, from helping set up your business profiles to developing engaging and interesting content to helping identify leads and new customers.

If you’d like to know more about how we can help grow your business, then get in touch today.

Blogs, Marketing Plan

12th December 20220

10 Bad Marketing Habits to Kick in 2023

As 2023 rapidly approaches, brands, creators, influencers, and social media managers will be striving to discover and develop new marketing strategies for the next 12 months, as well as keeping a keen eye on the latest trends.

But before you launch into new and untested social media waters, we wanted to have a look at some of the things you should stop doing on your social platforms in 2023, and what you should be doing instead.

So as well as cutting back on takeaway food, taking part in Dry January, and remembering to go to the gym, resolve to quit these 10 social media habits in 2023.

1. Neglecting video content

With TikTok hitting the 1 billion monthly users mark in 2021, becoming the seventh most globally popular social media platform, and Instagram continues to update Reels to keep up, if you aren’t making the most of video on TikTok or Instagram Reels, then you could be missing out on a huge audience.

You don’t necessarily need to be using both platforms, but content can very easily be repurposed for cross-promotion, and supercharge your success in the new year. Read up on Instagram Reels and TikTok to learn all you can, so you can promote your brand and find and engage with new audiences.

2. Not defining your niche

The attention spans of social media users are notoriously short, meaning that your window of opportunity to make that vital first impression is minuscule at best.

This means that you need to define your niche and target market quickly, as soon as someone views your profile. Ensure that your social media bio defines who you are, whom you serve, and what you share, and inject a dose of personality and credibility to help hook people into your content. It will give your social media marketing strategy a well-needed boost.

3. Content that’s irrelevant to your audience

It’s vital that you know your audience in order to increase your followers, engagement, and website traffic, and boost sales. In 2023, make sure you know the needs, challenges, aspirations, and pain points of your audience, as they will want to know what’s in it for them, and whether your brand understands what matters to them.

Self-serving content is great for helping develop a personality for your brand, but instead of simply posting a photo of your tasty salad, share the recipe, or instead of boasting about gym gains, detail your fitness regimen.

4. Forgetting the hook

The hook is the carefully crafted opening statement that immediately grabs your readers’ attention, enticing them to read more – see above about short attention spans!

Carefully develop the copy on your social media posts so that people stop and read instead of scrolling past your Reels and TikTok posts and entice them to read the full caption, turn on the sound and listen to your video, and engage with your stories.

5. Neglecting the analytics tab

If you want to take a deep dive into the best and worst-performing content in the past 12 months, then you should make yourself more familiar with the analytics tab, and start the new year on the right foot.

Check to see which posts had the most and least likes, shares, saves, comments, plays, and highest/lowest reach. Did you find there were common themes for top-performing or worst-performing content? Investigate what works and what doesn’t, and you’ll soon discover what your audience wants more of, and what you should drop going forward into 2023.

6. Forgetting to use social media as a sales tool

It can be easy to forget that Instagram is a powerful sales tool, packed with features that can help you make sales right within the platform, and in some cases, you might not even need a website to generate revenue through sales.

The basics for any online-operating business are a way for consumers to find you, a compelling offer, product, or service, and a means for people to send payment, and you can find that on most social media platforms.

7. Quantity over quality

We’ve all seen those posts with messages such as ‘Want to grow on Instagram? Simply post Reels every single day for 30 days!’

It might work for some accounts, but it isn’t going to work for everyone. It’s more important to be consistent with your social media content. Instead of testing every day for the sake of posting, post three times a week, but use your A-game content to help build a sustainable social media marketing strategy that will last all year.

8. Competition over community

You should care about other creators’ work, especially within your niche. Like, comment, and share other creators’ work, and develop mutually beneficial relationships. You likely share similar audiences, and their followers will also love your content.

However, ensure any relationships developed are meaningful, not just service-level, as you want value-driven, genuine, and authentic connections. Your audience will quickly see through anything that appears superficial.

Community over competition is a mantra to remember in 2023, and it’s not just about chasing clout, but supporting each other and growing together.

9. Not driving people to your website

If the main reason you’re on social media is to redirect people to your website, eCommerce shop, or blog, then you will need to remind your audience from time to time and give them a nudge in the right direction.

If you find you’re being asked the same questions in comments and DMs, then why not write a FAQ blog that can go into greater depth? The next time you get asked a question, you can redirect to your website.

Remind people at the end of posts to tap on the link in your bio so they can find out more about your product, service, or offer, or use the link sticker in Instagram Stories to drive traffic even easier in one tap.

Don’t forget to add a call-to-action on your blog to help get people more engaged with your content and your brand. Once you get a ‘yes’ to opt into an email list, then it becomes easier to elicit another ‘yes’ when making purchasing decisions.

10. Selling a product not a lifestyle

No matter how good your product or service is, consumers are not interested in it. What they are looking for is how it will transform their lifestyle.

No one cares about the capacity or number of pockets that designer handbag has, but they will certainly care about it elevating their level of status, the sense of accomplishment, belonging to an elite group, or even how it could boost their self-esteem.

You should think about your product or service in the same way and develop a narrative around your brand that people will buy into. Sell them the lifestyle, not the product.

Onwards into 2023!

New Year’s resolutions always seem doomed to fail. A few weeks into a dark, grey, and cold January, getting up early to hit the gym feels like a terrible idea, while a bottle of wine and a takeaway pizza on a Friday night becomes increasingly more tempting.

But if you take note of these marketing resolutions, and stick with them, you can help make 2023 your year, grow your business, increase your audience, and get on the road to success!

If you’re looking for assistance with your marketing this year, then we’re here to help at Tonic, so get in touch today, and have a very happy, and fruitful, new year!

Blogs, Digital, Marketing Plan, Out of home

3rd November 20220

How to Develop a Marketing Plan

No matter whether you’re dipping your toe into the world of marketing for the first time, or you’re a seasoned professional, trying to keep up with the ever-changing landscape of marketing trends can be overwhelming.

Even during this year alone, there has been a shift to short-form videos, new platforms arise, while others fall out of favour, and the COVID-19 pandemic has continued to impact the world. In most cases, what was a tried and tested marketing strategy yesterday simply might not be working for you by tomorrow.

To ensure that your marketing efforts continue to be successful, and to maintain a sense of relevance with your increasingly picky audience, you must stay ahead of the curve, and one means of accomplishing that is to develop a marketing strategy that covers all the bases.

We wanted to have a look at how to develop your marketing strategy in 2022 and beyond, and how to put it into practice with a marketing plan.

The Importance of a Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy
A robust marketing strategy will help you gain traction with your target audience, which includes those who are unaware of your brand as well as your most loyal repeat customers.

By neglecting to create a defined marketing strategy, you’ll be taking potshots in the dark, and keeping your fingers crossed that you manage to hit your target, which ultimately costs time, money, and precious resources.

A marketing strategy needs to:
Align your marketing team to specific goals
Help align your marketing efforts with the brand’s business objectives
Allow you to identify and test your marketing efforts to see what gets the best response from your target audience

In developing a successful marketing plan, there are seven steps to take into account. Develop your marketing plan, create buyer personas, identify your goals, choose the right tools, review existing recourses, audit and plan campaigns, and implement your strategy.

Develop a marketing plan

While a marketing strategy will determine why your marketing team needs certain resources, take certain actions, and set certain goals, a marketing plan lists the set of actions you need to take to achieve it.

Your marketing plan is your roadmap to help organise, execute, and track your marketing strategy over a given period. It will help you deliver your strategy, as well as determine what works and what doesn’t, as well as tie in with your business goals.

Create buyer personas

Defining your target audience can be tricky, and if you discover that you are unable to pin it down in a simple sentence, then creating buyer personas is a way to develop a snapshot of your ideal customer.

For example, clothing retailer H&M, despite an extensive product portfolio, primarily targets women aged between 20 and 34, who are looking for fashionable, up-to-date, and trendy apparel at a low price. They could define a buyer persona as Budget Brenda, a stylish working-class urbanite in her late 20s, who wants to have a wardrobe full of designer clothing at low prices.
Keeping Budget Brenda in mind, the brand’s marketing team have a clear definition of whom they want to target. Buyer personas include psychographic and demographic information, such as age, income, location, and interests, which Brenda has listed in her description.

Of course, while Brenda might be H&M’s primary focus in this fictional example, other buyer personas can be developed for young male shoppers, families with children, and even homeowners for their homeware ranges.

Buyer personas should be at the core of your marketing strategy.

Identify goals

Your marketing strategy goals need to reflect the brand’s business goals. For example, if one of the business goals is to have 200 people attend a conference you are holding in the next quarter, then one of the marketing goals should be to boost online registration of the conference by 10 per cent by the end of the month to ensure you stay on track.

Other goals could include increasing brand awareness, generating high-quality leads, or growing thought leadership within your industry.

You need to identify what your goals need to be as well as how your marketing department can work to achieve them.

Choose the right tools

Once you have defined your goals, then you need to use the right tools to measure their success.

There are many different software suites such as social media schedulers that can provide analytics that will help you keep track of what works and what doesn’t. Tools such as Google Analytics can measure blog and web page performance.

Review media

To help develop your strategy, assess what resources you have that can help. You can streamline this review by considering your assets as belonging to three different categories – paid, owned, and earned media.

Paid media is any channel on which you spend money to help attract your target audience, including offline channels such as TV and radio advertising, direct mail, and billboards, to online channels such as social media platforms, websites, and search engines.

Owned media is anything that your marketing team creates, for instance, photos, videos, podcasts, infographics, blogs, etc

Earned media refers to user-generated content, such as shares on social media, tweets or Instagram posts mentioning your brand or products.

Collate these materials in each media category into a central location to allow you to gain a clear picture of what you have and how you can use them in your strategy.

For example, if you produce a weekly blog – owned media – you may promote the blog on Twitter – paid media – which customers may then retweet – earned media. This can help you develop a more well-rounded marketing strategy.

It can also provide you with the opportunity to spring-clean your resources and get rid of any that don’t easily fit into any of the three categories, as well as help you determine any gaps in your resources.

Audit and plan marketing campaigns

Now you have gathered all your resources, you need to decide which content will help you. Focus initially on your owned media and marketing goals. For example, updating your call-to-action at the end of blogs or newsletters can help boost online registration for the conference in the above example.

Follow this by taking a close look at your buyer personas. For example, consider a business that creates podcast creation software. If one of the buyer personas is looking for a way to add sound effects to the audio, but you have no content that shows how to do that with your product, make a short-form video for Instagram that demonstrates how effective your product is at solving this problem.

Lastly, develop a content creation plan, which needs to include topic clusters, goals, format, and the appropriate channels for each piece of content, and don’t forget to consider the challenges faced by your buyer personas that it will help solve.

Implement your strategy

Your market research and planning should now present you with a clear vision of how to execute your strategy, and by whom. The final step is to now bring all that together and assign actions to your plans.

Define your strategy in a document that maps out the steps necessary to implement your campaign. It is important to think long-term when creating this document and keep in mind that the standard strategy document will be for the next 12 months. This document should become the main guide for your marketing efforts.

This document needs to outline all the details that have been outlined in the above sections and will ensure you are all set for the coming year.

What happens next?

Developing a robust marketing strategy takes time and hard work, and dedication the ensure you reach your target audience whenever and wherever they are and want to be reached.

Stick with your plan, use all the resources at your disposal, and use customer feedback and research to help you refine your strategy and maximise your time on the marketing channels on which your audience spends most of their time.

If you need help developing your marketing strategy for your business, then come and talk to us at Tonic, and we can help set you on the right track to success!

Tag: plan

Rise Of The Machines! Will AI Replace Human Marketers?

A Guide To Marketing Terms For Beginners

10 Bad Marketing Habits to Kick in 2023

How to Develop a Marketing Plan

Get in touch

Read our Blog