Your Guess Is As Good As Mine (But Your Plan Is Still A Guess)
The first question I get from prospective clients is something like, “Do you think I should do webinars or make a video?”. And I have to diplomatically share how…
A well-researched marketing strategy informs a brand’s messaging & content and makes the selection of which tactic to use very apparent.
Many of us have the skill and know-how to build a website and create an email campaign. It is certainly a less expensive route to perform these tasks than paying a marketing professional to contribute. The problem is, without an inspired and tested strategy the results may be poor. Or worse, you can end up with a slew of unqualified leads.
Three Case Studies: Marketing Strategies Outperform Just Tactics
(Or How Intuitive Leaps Occur During Marketing Strategy Development)
Mini Case Study #1: Goldilocks Markets
Startup Founder Tactical Marketing Plan: A client went to industry shows, the founder created personas, used HubSpot to build sequenced email campaigns, and built their website. He accurately described the platform as a “real estate crowdfunding” system. The problem was they received a ton of unqualified leads (looking for help raising money).
Strategic Marketing Plan: Researching the industry and speaking with dozens of look-alike prospects revealed “Software to automate real estate fundraising, investment management, and investor relations” was closer to the mark. We narrowed the persona to a specific size company, not too big (to build their own platform) and not too small (to not afford our platform), but just right. A Goldilocks market.
Case Study #2: Three Strikes & Your Out
Startup Founder Tactical Marketing Plan: A European idea management platform marketed their offering by exhibiting at shows, writing blog posts (detailing their social science algorithms), and periodic newsletters (sent to past show attendees) talking about product enhancements. By educating buyers they served as market makers, but weren’t winning deals.
Strategic Marketing Plan: I was chartered to introduce the platform to North American prospects (later Worldwide). The initial target market was America’s largest companies. We were up against 3 well known US based competitors. There were three challenges: We lacked credibility. We were an unknown. A purchase of our platform might not be a safe choice.
- Thought Leadership: Identifying our target persona as The Chief Innovation Officer, I spoke and met with dozens. This made it easy to discover trends. I translated what I learned often, published as blog posts. (If you search my Ron Shulkin + idea management you’ll find hundreds of posts over three years). I’m a big believer in creating repurpose-able content and so each blog informed a dozen social posts, an Infograph, an eBook and eventually inspired my contribution as a co-author of a graduate business school program textbook on innovation and ideation. We collected so much useful information we created a webinar series. As Thought Leaders, we began to be invited to visit prospects’ offices.
- Building Community: Nurturing relationships with innovation professionals helped me understand: “These Are My People!” To nurture relationships throughout the community of everyone who was interested in technology like ours, I founded the over 1000-strong LinkedIn Idea Management Group.
- Market Credibility: Becoming A Safe Choice: Our buyers check with industry analysts on big enterprise wide solution purchase decisions. Industry analysts hadn’t yet reviewed and assessed the idea management space. I put considerable thought and time into analyst relations. Tenacious efforts inspired both a Gartner & Forrester review of idea management platforms. My client’s platform was firnly in the Leader quadrant. This enhanced our stature among clients actively considering our platform. It also inspired unsolicited RFPs to arrive. Buyers trusted us!
Case Study #3: The Pivot Payoff
Startup Founder Tactical Marketing Plan: The product visionary at a UK headquartered, consumer engagement, digital marketing company, managed a marketing tactic program. They exhibited at shows, created video explainers and relied on word of mouth. Their Gamification based platform successfully sold in Singapore, Sydney and London, mostly on the strengths of the sales team. They penetrated banking, real estate, health club chains and restaurant vertical markets.
Strategic Marketing Plan: I was excited to roll out this brain-science driven consumer engagement product to prospects in North America. Reaching out to my extensive network of senior marketing people and their agency counterparts, I discovered they were unimpressed. One agency executive pointed out, “Ron, Gamification is not an exciting topic anymore. Even you wrote a blog post on the topic over a year ago”.
A deep dive into the products features revealed it also delivered “Interactive Engagement, coupled with Real-Time Behavior Monitoring”. This was the definition of “Shopper Marketing”, a technology for which CPG and Retailers were clamoring. We designed and executed a brand awareness and lead generation process, amassed a list of contacts with titles in our target vertical markets, created story telling content, demonstrated thought leadership via white papers, e-books, speaking engagement topics, webinars, and omni channel marketing campaigns.
I wrote about this from a slightly different perspective more than a year ago: Slow Down! Get A Map Before You Drive Down Marketing Tactics Street
Ron Shulkin is the Founder of Fractional CMO Group LLC. He serves as the Fractional Chief Marketing Officer for emerging digital technology startups. Ron provides go-to-market strategy guidance and transformational roadmaps to companies of all sizes. He both architects and executes product launch campaigns, and hires, trains & manages sales teams. Armed with intellectual curiosity, Ron monitors, curates and writes about the latest in digital marketing technology.
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Marketing Strategies Outperform Just Tactics EVERYTIME