1. Simplify Your Vendor Network
How many vendors do you rely on to create and distribute a strategic marketing ideas and campaigns? For many companies, the list is long and growing. They rely on one cloud management company to supply their digital asset management software. Another vendor provides marketing templates for digital collateral. One vendor designs landing pages and digital downloads, while another prints and ships direct mail pieces. In fact, most marketing collateral solutions only work with a single production vendor.
Each link in the chain requires additional communications, approval processes, payment structures, and more. In addition, extra effort is dedicated to ensuring each vendor upholds the same brand standards so that campaigns appear cohesive across channels. It’s not hard to see how more vendors require more time and lead to slower campaigns.
That’s why one of the most effective ways to decrease campaign cycle time is to reduce the total number of vendors you use. Finding just a few vendors who can handle all of your needs won’t just cut down on delivery time—it’ll have a drastic impact on your budget. An alternative solution is to manage all vendors from a single marketing collateral solution, like the engineered to order software from BlueSky ETO.
2. Share Your Strategic Marketing Ideas
Is your marketing department an oligarchy? Before you answer, ask yourself this: How many employees have the power to create or modify collateral? If you’re like many businesses, the number is small. This hierarchy is often created out of fear—that if too many team members have access, too many mistakes will be made.
That would explain why, according to the 2016 DMA Statistical Fact Book, only 4% of franchise owners are given the power to design or modify branded materials. Companies who identified brand consistency as an important factor reported giving only 8-9% of resellers and partners these capabilities. Even among event and field marketing team members, less than 22% had permission to create and edit marketing material.
What does this mean for strategic marketing ideas? While limiting permissions helps exert control over brand identity, it can also slow production and delivery to a crawl. The time it takes to conceptualize, create, distribute, and analyze each strategic campaign multiplies. Your local marketers are frustrated and losing business as they wait for the strategic marketing materials they need.
An engineered-to-order Brand Marketing Center offers the perfect solution. With a Brand Marketing Center from BlueSky ETO, executives can set specific permission levels for each employee. With the help of brand-compliant marketing templates, local marketers can edit POS displays, direct mail marketing campaigns, email, and print ads to reflect local interests. Social media managers can deliver posts quickly without help from the entire design team. This impacts every level of a company, shaving off endless hours of design and marketing work to make campaign delivery more efficient than ever before.
3. Improve Inventory Management to Decrease Delivery Time
More marketers are taking an omni-channel marketing approach than ever before. They’re linking email campaigns, direct mail campaigns, social media endeavors and more into one cohesive marketing campaign. While digital delivery doesn’t rely on physical materials, direct mail always will. Omni-channel marketers want to distribute their strategic marketing ideas across platforms and mediums simultaneously, but waiting for print collateral can slow their efforts.
It’s the sourcing of physical print stock that often creates this bottleneck. Some marketing experts suggest solving the problem by increasing in-house inventory of printing supplies. But this solution only applies to brands who print and distribute their direct mail in-house. That’s a rarity in today’s business world. For a more scalable solution, brands should select vendors with a wide array of clients and multiple printing capabilities. These printers will have a larger on-hand inventory and will be far more likely to begin production quickly, without having to order additional supplies first.
4. Strategic Marketing Ideas Rest on a Foundation of Evergreen Content
Does your brand rely on a linear marketing strategy? Many companies do. Their process might look something like this:
- Market Research
- Data Analysis
- Idea Generation
- Collateral Design
- Lengthy Approval Process
- Coordination With Vendors
- Separate Delivery Process for Each Platform
- KPI Tracking
- Data Analysis
Each campaign functions as a separate entity, following a similar path from start to finish. Once the last step is complete, the cycle begins again. For a large part of the planning and delivery process, prospective customers (and even warm leads) are being ignored by the marketing team.
While it may not be possible or effective to restructure your entire process around these strategic marketing ideas, you can ensure a steady stream of leads through inbound marketing tactics. When you do, look to evergreen content as your most powerful resource.
What separates evergreen content? Its ability to consistently flow through the inbound cycle. This content isn’t tied to a current one-off promotion. It doesn’t reference an upcoming event or discuss a current news item. For these reasons, it remains relevant and can be distributed for months or even years after its creation.
A white paper on management skills, a blog post detailing the importance of your services, an infographic about the history of your industry—they’re all examples of evergreen content. Create your own and remember to continuously promote it through automated marketing campaigns and social media scheduling platforms.
5. Identify Choke Points for Strategic Marketing Ideas
Most sales teams have an established funnel. Using marketing automation platforms like Hubspot, they can monitor funnels for each team member and identify where leads are in the buyer’s journey. Visual aids like this let sales members and executives see at a glance what actions need to happen to move prospects to the next step in the buyer’s journey
Do you have a similar system for your marketing team? If you’re shaking your head, you’re missing out on a major opportunity. With a tracking system like Hubspot, an internal software program, or even a tool like Slack or a program like Excel, try creating an established funnel for your entire marketing team.
Instead of tracking leads, track your current campaign or campaigns. Make sure that whatever system you use updates in real time and is shared with your entire marketing department. Update and monitor your campaign tracking every day and ensure each action is marked with its date of completion. This way, inactivity is easy to spot. Identify your choke points and “unclog” your drains to keep your strategic marketing ideas in motion!
Speeding up your strategic marketing ideas won’t always come naturally. Change can be difficult. To create a more efficient system, you’ll need courage to challenge the status quo and innovate new solutions. Remember, just because you’ve always done something one way, it’s not the only way. In the words of Therese Fowler, “Some rules are nothing but old habits that people are afraid to change.”
So be a little fearless and adopt one of these strategies. Which do you think will make the biggest impact? How have you been able to speed up your own strategic marketing efforts in the past? Share a comment to let us know!
Build Your Brand with a Brand Management Software Platform
Building your brand takes time. You're determining your target audiences. You're defining the benefits your brand offers. And you're establishing your brand voice. Plus you're always working to staying ahead of your competitors. But you have to ask yourself a serious...
7 Traits of the Best Digital Asset Management System
When it comes to sharing your brand's digital marketing assets, how efficient are you? Are you still emailing files to distributed marketers and personnel that need them—or do you have the best digital asset management system in place to expertly organize and deliver...
8 Key Benefits of a Brand Management Platform
From direct mail to digital ads and printed collateral, your modern-day marketing goal is to present your brand consistently and strategically regardless of how many locations you have to account for. A brand management platform can be your competitive advantage if...
I will have to look into the benefits of Hubspot for my company.
Great ideas! I’m always looking for ways to improve when it comes to marketing dept and this is helpful tips. Thanks!
Wow. I studied marketing in college and wasn’t aware of this. Thank you for all this valuable details
Marketing is a huge part of any business and if it’s done right your business can flourish however if it’s done wrong it can mean the end to your business. Great tips!
You made marketing sound effortless. Thanks for breaking it down in easy to understand language.
good strategic planning and being focus of such important pointers will give you success. Very informative!
What I’ve found is research is critical for my business’s success. These marketing strategies are ones that I need to consider so I can evaluate what I’m doing well and where I can improve.
An effective marketing strategy is indeed essential to a business’ success. These are very good tips. Thanks for sharing.
This is very informative and the way you broke the posts into pointers proved to be very helpful.
An amazing post. I was just thinking about how to better my marketing skills and this post is so spot on. Will definitely have to take some notes and get working.
These are good marketing tips. This is so important for brand building.
this is such an informative post. It will help a lot of businesses. Having great and perfect plans is a must.
This is very valuable information that any business can utilize. I couldn’t agree more about the importance with evergreen content.
I’ll have to keep these in mind. I’m always trying to get better with marketing.
It was a very interesting read with loads of good points. It’s important to always measure and analyze, in order for your marketing strategy to be successful.
These are great tips and strong advice for any business owner! Thanks for laying them out like this.
Very informative, you have covered some good areas here and im sure it will help many starting out!
Indeed a very informative post. Perfect for those start-ups and businesses that needs improvement.
Evergreen content is always a plus in my book. And it tends to do well on my website. I always recommend it to my clients.
As a business owner, this is really helpful. I know many others that could benefit from reading this.
Thanks for the great tips! I really agree with having evergreen content to stand out.
This is a great post. Amazing tips, I’m bookmarking this for future reference.
Your tips are really awesome and helpful for business owners. You made it easier to understand the flow and stategies that can be used.
I couldn’t agree more about evergreen content. This is a great list of tips for anyone looking to help their business succeed.
Liked your information on marketing choke points as I’ve not considered that before.
Thank you all the information and the detailed explanation. Running a business is hard, but posts like this make it easier!
These are smart tips for running a business. Having a plan is always good.
Thanks for breaking these steps into an easy to follow guide. This is going to help tons of business owners out there.