11 Aug Don’t follow the crowd with your marketing campaigns

If you want to get ahead in business, you need to strategically manage your image.

This means creating high quality marketing and branding campaigns. It’s critical that your approach is unique and tailored to both your current situation and your goals.

If you want to stand out and achieve something beyond mediocrity, your marketing will need to be ahead of the crowd. Here’s a few tips on how you can go your own way and make an impact.

Strategies must be unique

There is little to no benefit to be found in using a cookie-cutter approach to marketing. Downloading a free template online and putting the suggestions into effect are not likely to gain impressive results.

Your marketing and branding strategy should be created from scratch, taking into account everything that is unique about your company. Budgets, time constraints and your overall company goals also need to be considered.

Gather every ounce of data

If you are going to design your own bespoke marketing campaign, you need to understand where your company is currently positioned in the market. Take a look at the metrics from old campaigns (successful and less so).

Interview previous project managers, digital content teams and anyone else that’s observed results. What can you learn so far?

Combine this gold mine of data with the vision for the company.

What is important? How do you want to present your brand? Do you have hard targets and timelines that need to be met?

When you have a longer term vision of the company’s trajectory (in both theory and practice) you can tailor the next campaigns to achieve the desired results.

Tailor your approach

You may seek out case studies of effective marketing and branding campaigns, but remember that not all businesses are alike.

What works for a multi-billion dollar shoe company will not translate into useable strategies for a small B2B office supply firm.

You will need to assess the aims of your outreach. Are you trying to build a sizeable following online? Or are you developing an excellent online quick-response strategy to support your large consumer base?

Take inspiration from appropriate sources, but don’t try to reproduce their strategies.

Take a fresh look

It may be tempting to create a strategy document once and assume that marketing and branding is taken care of.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Your strategies need to be dynamic and interacted with regularly. Keep a running file of data that feeds back from your campaigns. Review the strategy in combination with company goals and the collated data once every 12-18 months.

This will give you a large enough window of time to observe what’s working and what’s not. Don’t leave it any longer – online consumer behavior is relatively quick to shift, and your strategies need to be responsive to those changes.

Invest time creating a unique branding campaign and you should see excellent results – far above the crowd.