Processes And Marketing
Every element of your business, from the small to the large, has a process. You may have worked hard to define the steps of the process, working out how to most efficiently get from A to B and what extra steps you want to include. Or you may just get it done, with no official or written process at all. But for marketing to be successful and deliver you the results you want, there needs to be a strategy behind it – and a process to follow. At Process Envision we know that many businesses don’t have a defined marketing process, and some aren’t even sure where they would start putting one together. So we’ve put together a little 6 step guide to help you build a marketing process that will work, whether you’re in year 1, year 5 or year 50 of running your business.
Define Your Mission Statement
To get your marketing process right, you need to go right back to the beginning. So take a step back and ask yourself, what purpose does your company serve? What is your USP? How can you summarize that mission in one or two sentences? And most importantly, how are you going to promote that to the world? This will form the basis of your marketing approach, and therefore your marketing process.
Create A Marketing Strategy
If you want successful marketing, you need a good strategy behind it. This part may take some legwork, but it will be worth it in the long run. To create a marketing strategy, you need to look into:
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- Setting marketing goals
- Defining your target audience
- Assigning a marketing budget
- Deciding what types of content to create and where to source it
- Identifying your marketing, advertising and distribution channels
- Assigning tasks to individuals within your organisation
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All of these decisions should be based around your marketing goals, as well as the behaviour and preferences of your target customers.
Execute Your Process
Now that you know what your strategy is, how your products and services will work and what messaging you want to use, it’s time to hit the button and get it all started! This is also where it gets complicated, because this step needs a process within a process. Creating your marketing strategy is one process, while carrying it out is another. You will need to choose which types of content you want to create, where you want to put them, and who will be in charge of creating them. This stage also involves building promotional plans, any campaign tools you need, and working out how to automate your audience’s journey through your marketing funnel. This secondary process will probably change with each campaign you run, but it’s important to work it out so that no steps are missed and your campaign can be given a chance to perform at it’s best.
Measure Your Results
Measurement is a key area of the marketing process that most people forget to include. If you don’t measure your campaigns, you will never know if they succeed or not, and you will never truly know if you made a profit, covered your costs or actually lost money on them. So for each marketing campaign you need to set metrics and KPIs to measure success with. It could be clicks on a link, email enquiries or even just likes on a post–it all depends on what your aim was. You should also develop a set of reporting templates, which ensure you always get the information you need in the same format, no matter what the campaign.
Documenting It All!!
Now that you’ve got your process straight and you know the steps you need to take, it’s time to write it all down and document it! After all, if you only have one person following the marketing process, what happens when they leave? There is nothing left behind for the new person to pick up and work through, and often a new process will be created in its place, which can have a real impact on your marketing. SO take all of those individual steps and write them up into a single process document, so that your process doesn’t disappear after a few days.
If you’re struggling to put all of your marketing activities into a process, then we can help you. At Process Envision we specialise in helping businesses take a good look at how they do things, breaking it down into steps and creating a structured process from it. With workshops designed to bring everyone in the business together, we help you understand your process and the steps involved, and build a strong, repeatable process that can be followed by anyone for months and years to come.
