A Survey of 1,597 Marketers Revealed the 4 Steps Behind Every Successful Marketing Strategy

As a marketer, or a business owner who dabbles in marketing, you have to make a lot of decisions. How do you know if you are making the right ones? Is your strategy working, or is it off base? What does success look like?

It can be hard to go at it alone — which is why we surveyed 1,500 marketing professionals to learn what activities are most likely to lead to success. We wanted to understand what separated successful marketers from the bunch.

We learned that there are four major things that contribute to success. The good news? Anyone can implement them to make their efforts more successful.

Top Marketers Document Their Marketing Strategy

In our study, we learned that marketers who document their marketing strategy are 538% more likely to report success than those who don’t.

This makes sense, as your marketing strategy is your north star. It helps you prioritize and execute everything your team will be working on for the next year. Teams with a clear sense of where they are going and how they need to get there, have a better chance for success.

Top Marketers Document Their Marketing Processes

Another thing that separates successful marketers is a documented marketing process. In fact, marketers who document their process are 466% more likely to report success than those who don’t.

Documenting your process is all about providing reliable and reusable workflows for your team to follow. After some refinement, these processes can become the roadmap for creating successful outcomes on a ongoing basis.

Outlining what success looks like will help you create consistent results at scale. Do that over and over and you will see positive results.

Marketing teams tend to be ruled by missed deadlines and fire drills. A clear and well defined process will reduce wasted time and keep your team focused on the right outcomes.

Top Marketers Set Goals

It may come as no surprise that marketers who set goals are 429% more likely to report success than those who don’t.

Goals are important. The simple act of setting a goal can get everyone on the same page and increase team focus. Setting goals together as a team can also provide buy-in needed to overcome hurdles along the way.

When it comes to goals, I advise marketers to keep it simple. The sheer number of metrics available to digital marketers at any given time can be daunting. Where do we even begin?

My advice? Focus on one or two key metrics and track them on a daily basis. Find the metric that has the potential to make the biggest impact on your business and discuss it with your team regularly. You might be surprised at how quickly everyone jumps on board and starts contributing ideas.

One last bit of encouragement, our data also showed that of 81% of those who set goals actually achieved them — proving that you can achieve what you set your mind to!

Top Marketers Conduct Customer Research

Customer research is almost never a part of your job description as a marketer, but it should be. We found that successful marketers are 242% more likely to conduct customer research at least once per quarter.

There’s little doubt as to why this works. Conducting research results in better understanding. Better understanding results in improved communication.

Inexperienced teams jump in and do stuff. Experienced teams take the time to understand their customers first.

Customer research often consists demographics such as age, location, gender, etc. These things don’t tell you much about what influences customer behavior. Rather, you should do qualitative research by scheduling regular calls with customers. Here are my go to questions to ask:

1. What prompted you to start looking for a solution like {our product}?

2. Why did you choose {our product}?

3. What is the most significant difference {our product} is making in your business today?

4. How would you {briefly} describe {our product} to someone else?

5. What is the single greatest benefit {our product} provides?

What would happen if your team started doing 10 customers calls per month? Our results meant we were better able to marry our messaging to the way customer’s expressed their needs.

It might be enough to make you one of the marketers that are 538% more successful from the rest, and your boss will definitely notice that!

This article originally appeared on Inc.