One Stop Marketing

MARKETING STRATEGY
So, you’re ready to take a more process approach in your marketing efforts, but you’re not sure where to start…
You’ve come to the right place. Marketing strategy must come before tactics and these 10 questions will help guide you through the process.
From overall characteristics about ideal clients to logistics about measurement and offers, these questions walk you through the steps you should take prior to hitting “go.”
For example, it may help to know that your clients real problem is cash flow and the value they get from your solution is getting paid faster.
Bottom line: the goal of a marketing strategy is to increase business and grow awareness of your organisation.

Here are the 10 questions to ask before creating your marketing strategy.

1. Who is your ideal customer?
This question helps you focus in on your sweet spot. Ideal can mean many things — who can you deliver the greatest value to, who do you enjoy working with, who needs what you do most. Give some thought to how you might reach them and appeal to them. Use your most successful accounts to date to help you think about what makes them ideal for you. (Hint: they are profitable and talk about you.)
2. What core problem do you solve for ideal customers?
Think about what your customers core problem is. This question lets you discover the real value about you, your services/products and your company. Write a description of the problems you solve for ideal clients.
3. Who are your primary competitors?
If you’re going to war, you must know your enemy. Smart marketers employ some form of competitive research in an effort to better understand what products and services, pricing models and value propositions they are up against.
4. What is your primary competitive advantage?
Trying to figure out how to be better than the competition — better product, better service, better features, and better price is worthless. In my opinion focusing on building a better process or better relationships is the surest and maybe simplest way to create a true competitive advantage that someone might care about.
5. What is your sample offer to first time customers?
Today’s shift in buying now demands a very tangible way prospects can experience your offer. Buyers want a understanding of what they’re potentially buying, and they want it right away — essentially a buyer wants the opportunity to see and experience a service/product in action very early on. The answer is offering prospects a way to sample your expertise, product or service. This can be in the form of free consultations, money-back guarantees, demos, seminars, proof of concept, audits, trail offers, assessments, etc.
6. What is your maximum cost to acquire a new customer?
I think the cost of acquiring a new customer is one of those data points that is critical to understand in any business. Once you understand the lifetime value of a customer, you can determine how much you’re willing to pay in new customer acquisition costs. For example, if the lifetime value of your average customer is $1,000, anything you spend under that in new customer acquisition costs will be profit — or the marginal net worth of your average customer.
7. How many new customers you can handle per month?
The customer experience is everything today. You must make sure your organization is equipped to handle incoming request and on-boarding new clients. Ruin this in a social driven world and you’re doomed.
8. How do you ensure prompt follow-up on sales inquiries?
Lack of a process approach to selling is the biggest weakness for most small businesses. Installing a sales process, one that everyone involved in selling in the organization operates, is the fastest way to improve overall results. I’ve seen lead conversion rates go from 3% to over 50% when all of the parts of a marketing and sales process work together.
9. What target keywords do you want to rank in Google?
Keyword research has long been the primary tool for search engine optimization plans. The idea was that you found out what people in your industry were searching for and you optimized your site and pages to try to show up on page one — pretty simple. Today, I believe that content is the primary tool for optimizing your effectiveness is just about every channel your clients use — it’s the key to SEO, social media sharing, referrals, email marketing and even online and offline advertising.
10. How do you measure marketing investments?
Management consultant extraordinaire Peter Drucker famously said, “What gets measured, gets managed.” Now, while terms like measurement and management might seem like big company jargon, the fact is you can’t successfully grow a business unless you track what works and what doesn’t work.
We suggest using Google analytics or vendor specific analytic tools to measure your marketing. It gives real time reporting on social media, inbound links, seo, keywords and Pay per click marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
When asked to come into a business and evaluate marketing activities for growth or make marketing recommendations — this is where I start because this is where all the answers reside.

My Approach to the Creative Process
Here is a great creative process – not because it is a perfect process you should imitate, but just as a reference as you think about, develop, and refine your own.
I break creative process into 3 main parts: research, sketching and executing.
Research
begin by gathering all known information on the project and defining my goals. Unless this is a project that involved zero collaboration (which is almost never the case), this intel typically comes either straight from a client or from a creative brief (for you, this could be an email, a discussion with your boss, or a team meeting). This is important because it allows you to figure out what you don’t know. Things always get missed: there is always something you didn’t think to ask, or that wasn’t in the brief. Reach back out to whoever you need to and get your questions answered.
Once you have the all the necessary information, always start by listing out adjectives that describe the look and feel of the project, otherwise known as the tone. Depending on how well you know the client and how clear your initial guidelines were, this tone might either be well-defined or incredibly vague by this stage in the process.
Now on to actual research. This can come in many forms, but usually, start on the internet. Look at what others have done for inspiration and starting to immerse yourself in the task at hand. I also recommend getting away from your computer and phone and going out to explore. If you are working on a restaurant rebrand, perhaps you should visit other eateries and spaces that have a similar vibe to what you want to create. While I’m doing this, I am starting to take notes and draw small thumbnails.
The final and perhaps most important part of this phase is incubation. This sounds crazy, but you just have to put the job down and walk away from it. This could be for a couple hours or a couple days. It gives you time to think about the task without thinking about it, which will allow you to land on a much more original idea since you are stepping away from the inspiration you just consumed.
It doesn't start with an idea, rather you need to feed your brain information to help arrive at said idea.
Sketching
I can’t stress the importance of starting with a pen or pencil and paper, no matter if you’re designing a logo, a website, or a new org structure. There is something that happens when you physically put pen to paper that can’t be explained. I carry a Field Notes memo book and pen everywhere I go because I never know when an idea may strike. I can’t tell you how many times I have forgotten an idea because I wasn’t in a place where I could write it down or sketch it out quickly. Another benefit of sketching is that you can do it anywhere. You can go to your happy space or immerse yourself in a space that is inspiring.
I like the small memo books because I can fill the pages quickly and move on, it keeps me from getting hung up on one particular idea.

Don’t overthink the word sketching. During this phase, I will use a mix of thumbnail sketches and notes. Your sketches should be small and quick. It is important to get the ideas out quickly, so you can move onto the next one. The obvious solutions usually make it onto the paper first. Don’t settle for anything, make yourself push past the obvious and explore many different directions.
While I’m sketching I start to see what this can be in my head. You can draw upon your inspiration and research as well as other past experiences. This is your opportunity to come up with a unique and functional solution. At the end of this, you should have a handful of ideas that you feel are the best and worth pursuing further.
Execution
By the time you have researched, sketched and sketched some more you should have a pretty good idea of the direction you want to go. This should be the easiest part of the whole process. Think of it like a road trip: once you research and map it out, driving is the easiest part. I feel like it is important to note that sometimes once I start executing, I may land on something completely different from what I originally planned. That is okay and it is natural. This will usually come from iterating on the computer. Allow yourself to get off track sometimes, just make sure you aren’t forgetting your end destination.
So just to recap, define your process so you can identify ways of improving. Research, sketch, and execute.

1. Who is your ideal customer?
2. What core problem do you solve for ideal customers?
3. Who are your primary competitors?
4. What is your primary competitive advantage?
5. What is your sample offer to first time customers?
6. What is your maximum cost to acquire a new customer?
7. How many new customers you can handle per month?
8. How do you ensure prompt follow-up on sales inquiries?
9. What target keywords do you want to rank in Google?
10. How do you measure marketing investments?

Feeling human- Marketing is all about people. It is about understanding them better, trying to solve problems for your customers, working with people to make their business stronger.

Feeling the world- Marketing is about the market. Which, by definition, is broader than your office. A successful marketer has his finger on the pulse of the market and is out and about.

I love being creative, understanding my clients requirements and proposing the best way to help them grow their business and be successful

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