Written byCraig McBreenPosted on
August 25, 2016
You want to create a marketing machine for your business but you’re not quite sure where to start, are you?
Well, the first rule you must learn is this: An effective marketing strategy only comes when you treat marketing as a system. If you’ve started to setup a marketing framework for your business you’re getting there, but there really is a mix that will turn your system into a streamlined rocket ship.
Do you want to know what that beautiful marketing mix is? Of course you do.
The first 3 steps to build your marketing machine
1. You must have really good content. Think of this content as a steady diet of insightful, valuable content delivered to your target audience. Starting a blog is step one.
2. Your engagement touch points must be inline and firing on all cylinders. Social media channels, PR, email newsletter, whatever mix of touch points you have, you must have a mix that is working daily to build a brand that will grow your business.
3. Story. Yes, story. Storytelling is essential to your marketing mix. But story is about framing your content around your ideal customers. Storytelling in essence is about you being a teacher and telling your audience how you will fix their pain in an engaging way. Learn storytelling.
Elements 1, 2, and 3 are brilliant because together they can help you in a variety of ways. This marketing mix will help improve your SEO, build up your business’s brand, and most importantly, keep your marketing machine moving.
In her book “Spin Sucks,” PR expert Gini Dietrich describes how your brand should be represented: “The future of communications is to work with a team that has a deep understanding of your brand so they can represent you live.”
In the book, Gini goes into detail about how to effectively market your business online. Explaining that it’s about customer experience, real-time marketing, tangible results, and evolving content.
So Gini’s four points (customer experience, real-time marketing, tangible results, and evolving content) should be combined with my 1-2-3 mix (great content, active engagement touch points, and story). This is how you create a living, breathing marketing mix that has the potential to transform your business.
In essence, your marketing machine is a well-crafted platform with multiple touch points, and an engaging narrative crafted to help your audience.
The “living, breathing” thing is basically your website on steroids—a website that just doesn’t sit there but is overflowing with valuable, insightful blog articles that teach, videos that help your true customer advance, and podcasts that inform and entertain. You don’t have to do all, but you must treat your website as a lively entity that keeps delivering the goods.
And your social touch points are what Mark Schaefer describes as “brandstands.”
The narrative, the story that might transform your business, is about writing ongoing content that describes how you are going to help your ideal customer. You are simply Obi Wan helping Luke on his way. Continue to tell a story with that mindset—treating your customer as the hero.
This narrative sets the tone and keeps your train rolling so your team can do the following:
Build your own little brand world geared towards your best customers.
Craft a variety of great content on a continual basis. Content built to help them.
Observe and measure what you’re doing. Learn from the results and keep changing.
Keep your machine well-oiled and improve it daily.
So, what else do I need?
Good design. Visual branding that best represents your company, from your Facebook to mailers. Each property needs a consistent look and a tone that conveys who you are.
So, How do you start creating your own marketing machine built to knock everyone’s socks off?
Begin to build your marketing machine by asking questions. Talk to your best customers. Ask them what makes your company special, why they continue to work with you, why they hired you in the first place, etc.
Keep interviewing and you’ll quickly discover the most important questions. This is the framework you build from, to create topic ideas for copy on your site, online advertising, blog posts, and more.
Check out my post 3 Steps to dramatically improve your marketing. This goes a bit deeper into these very topics.
Do you want to bring your brand to life? Taking a few minutes to complete my brand audit will help you think about your current marketing efforts and what might need to change. It will also help me suggest several ways to improve your branding and marketing now: https://mcbreenmarketing.com/contact/brand-audit/
After you complete the form, we’ll contact you to schedule a time to go over the results and see how we can help.
If you are interested in learning more about our branding and marketing process, sign up for my email list below.
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