3 Reasons to Stick to Your Marketing Strategy

Why Your Ads, Blogs, Videos, and Pictures Aren’t Effective

The Skinny

When writing a blog, shooting a video, or snapping pictures for your next marketing collateral, we often get in the groove and forget the primary purpose of the thing we are trying to create. Opinions, buzzwords, and hot topics can often obstruct the real reason a piece of content is created. Common marketing wisdom says to create one very specific audience, or don’t create any at all. If your product, your service, and your content are all on different wavelengths, you are going to have one heck of a time getting anyone moved along the customer experience you set out to create in the first place.

The Fat

These are the reasons to stick to your original plan when creating media of all types.

1. You Will Miss Your Target Market

If you have done your research and set forth a target market and mapped the buyer’s journey for that particular target market, the content you create should fit perfectly into their journey. As the saying goes, you are not your target audience. If we deviate our content creation to cater to our personal or company needs, we inevitably will lose the target audience that we set forth to be our buyer.

In advertising and branded content, there must not be a separation of church and state. If your Facebook ads are configured to appeal to middle-aged weekend-warrior-man, but your post blog articles are focused on young moms, it will undoubtedly be difficult to delight the visitor who explores their way into your blog from an advertisement. Combat alienating your business by ensuring promotion and media creation teams are communicating effectively and sticking to the buyer’s persona agreed on in the early days of your marketing strategy.

2. Inconsistency Alienates

All content has to be consistent, both in timing and in purpose. Inconsistency in timing will rarely produce a consistent audience. Failure to be consistent with content will never build an audience. The folks who visit one day and enjoy the lean of your content may come back to your blog the next week and be disappointed by a completely different piece of content.

“Content marketing is not a project, its a process“ — Robert Rose

One way to combat an inconsistency in content is to plot out your content creation shortly after creating your strategy. This leaves no surprise of varying content type and allows you to implement an efficient process. This process goes further to prevent inconsistency, as well. Write blogs far enough in advance to get revising eyes on it, have a weekly video edited and curated a week in advance, and run your podcast by your editors at the same time. If you do these things and stick to your original strategy day in and day out you will eliminate inconsistencies your content.

3. Post Purchase Matters, Too

Good ‘ol Pareto’s rule tells us that 80% of our business are repeat customers. This means your content must, beyond all doubt, cater toward and build further rapport with the folks who have bought from you already. The Content Marketing Institute brought up how Wisconsin Electric gives a cookie book to customers that build great rapport and is heartwarming, but it also may lead to an increase in electricity usage. Your content can use the same approach with modern tools and bring as much value to the audience who bought from you two years ago as it does for someone who still hasn’t bought yet. Continuing the experience past the purchase is crucial and if you don’t stick to your long-term strategy, you run the risk of losing their loyalty as a delighted buyer.

Make sure you revisit your strategy every-s0-often to ensure the content you are implementing today is born out of the same mission when you started. If you genuinely are maintaining the original reason you began creating content, keep at it. If you see higher profits through a strategy change, it is important to consider seriously the loss of some of the folks who have hung around a long time.

The Takeaway

Many of the issues of not the following strategy are closely related to not having robust processes in place. If teams aren’t communicating, plans are not stuck to, or strategies aren’t revisited, you stand a high likelihood of running into the challenges that are posed from not sticking to the strategy set forth at the very beginning of the marketing process.