Important Steps to Marketing Success – How to Build a Marketing System

The main key to an effective marketing viewpoint is creating a marketing system. In this article, we will take a closer look at the important steps you must undertake to build a successful marketing system for your business.

1. Focus on Strategy Before Tactics

The first step to creating a successful marketing system is to know who your ideal customer is, and what their point problems are. If you don’t understand the value that your business can bring to each engagement, it’s nearly impossible to select the tactics you should use to reach your audience.

When you understand the ideal customer and create the narrowest definition possible for who that is, you can then connect what you are offering to solving the customers’ problems. This makes your approach not just about your products and services, but about your promise to solve those problems. If you don’t take the time to understand your ideal customer, there’s no way to build a marketing strategy that will speak to them.

2. Guide the Customer Journey

Because of the internet, the way people buy today is largely out of your hands. They have so many places to do research, ask networks, find out about you, and discover the products and services to solve their problems before they ever contact a company.

The customer journey comes into play with the marketing hourglass. The hourglass has seven stages: know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer. These stages represent the logical behavior in buying that many of your customers want to take.

Your job is to help them move through those stages sequentially.

Your first step is to understand how someone would come to know about a company like yours.

Likely, they would do a research or they would ask a friend. Marketing at this stage needs to show that you understand their pain points and that you might have the right solution for them. From there, you need to establish trust in your brand and perhaps even give them a way to try you.

When they do finally buy, that experience must be excellent in order to create repeat business. Not only that, but happy customers will also generate referrals.

All marketing efforts must be built around the concept of the marketing hourglass. When you understand how your customers buy and what they are expecting to achieve at each stage, you are able to build a marketing plan that exceeds their expectations along the way and creates happy, lifelong customers.

3. Make the Content

Content is not just a tactic, it is the voice of strategy. You have made a promise to solve a problem for your customers; you now need to be ready to meet people where they are (search engines, social media, etc.) and generate enough valuable content to dominate in those areas.

What the best you can do, to use something called content hubs to outshine in search and to create content that is valuable to read, find, and share. This content must also meet customers at every stage of their journey, from know and like all the way through to referrals.

4. Live By the Calendar

When you are developing a system, you have to have a plan. It doesn’t have to be long-term, focusing on three to four important priorities for the quarter is ideal. From there, you can break those priorities down into activities and projects so that you can plan the quarter and not expend energy chasing the next new thing.

You have to have fewer priories, and you have to make marketing a habit. It has to be something that you do daily. You have to build meetings with the appropriate people to make sure that you are moving those priorities along. Once you establish that habit, you should start documenting your processes. From there, you can decide what tasks you can delegate, either by adding more staff or outsourcing to others. The best way to do that is to use something like social media management tools to create a schedules and tasks, for example, Sposter online social media management tool helps you to plan your calendar, manages your tasks and even more!

The reality is that marketing never ends – it’s a cycle. Once you go through the important steps and build your marketing system, you want to constantly be reviewing, seeing what works and what doesn’t and changing your approach accordingly.