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It’s an unsettling feeling: sweaty palms, restless legs, nervous, hoping you don’t get asked about last quarter’s sales or marketing performance.
You’re not alone, almost everyone in a sales or marketing team has experienced this kind of anxiety throughout their professional careers.
Maybe you didn’t meet the sales quota, or your paid search and social ads didn’t perform as well as you would’ve liked. It is inevitable to feel a sense of frustration and defeat when these things happen, whether it’s with an internal team or with a marketing firm you hired.
Whether it’s in-house or external, you can’t seem to get it right. So, what is there to do?
Like we said before, we have been in your shoes before, and we have developed some excellent practices that have allowed us to help our clients succeed in their marketing and sales endeavors.
Here’s a helpful list of industry secrets that will help you eliminate wasted time and money, and spend more time making money and doing the things you love to do.
Know the Difference Between Tactics vs. Strategy
Before we discuss how to utilize the two, we need to differentiate them.
Tactics are the individual efforts (forms of media, messages, promotions, etc.) that make up a marketing campaign.
Strategy is the overarching plan that makes sure all the tactics are cohesive and aimed at accomplishing specific outcomes and conveying deliberate messages.
Traditional marketing and sales follow a “tactic-first” or “new-work-first” mindset. While this approach sometimes works, it’s somewhat equivalent to throwing enough stuff at the wall that eventually, something sticks.
Developing a strong strategy—not just blindly employing tactics—helps every part of marketing and sales act more synchronistically, and creates an easy-to-follow “method to the madness.”
Look at it this way. Marketing is a huge domino effect, where every single piece is extremely important for the final structure reveal.
You could set those dominos one-by-one, without a plan, hoping the final structure looks good. It MIGHT work, but most likely it won’t. Working domino-to-domino is not efficient, and it likely will end up being a huge waste of time.
Before you even lay your very first piece, you should already have a very detailed plan of where each piece belongs, why it belongs there, what it’s supposed to do, and how it fits into the final structure reveal.
The same goes for marketing and sales tactics. You can build a really aesthetically pleasing website or cool looking ads, but what happens after that? They’ll mean nothing without a specific purpose.
This is where strategy comes into play. It takes a comprehensive, multi-channel, multi-message, long-term approach to succeed in marketing and sales. You need great ads (tactics), powered by a comprehensive strategy, and the discipline to harness data to improve your results continuously.
Check out this blog → here ← and learn how you can build a marketing strategy that works.
Engage In Proactive Marketing
Many businesses run a reactive marketing strategy, meaning they create marketing strategies and tactics in reaction to the needs and wants of their consumers. This is not the optimal way forward.
These businesses are perpetually a step behind in their sales and marketing, caught in a never ending cycle of creating strategies on-the-fly and putting out fires with more tactics. In fact, as of this past January, it’s been projected that a whopping 14% of small businesses go under because of failed marketing alone.
On the contrary, proactive marketing strategies address consumers’ needs, desires, or goals first, taking a step back to look at available assets and coming up with a plan to use them most effectively.
This leaves no need for guessing or uncertainty once the plan is launched. Essentially, proactive strategy doesn’t involve guesswork; it’s composed of calculated decisions made for very specific purposes.
Effective proactive strategy takes all of your tactics and brings them together to work cohesively with each other, working to build up something greater than any of the tactics could on their own.
For example, your business decides to start sending out email newsletters to your potential customers to let them know about a new product you will be launching.
First, the copy has to make sense and talk about this new product directly. The call to action should ideally drive the subscriber to a specific landing page that has to do with this product, rather than just your website’s homepage.
Additionally, your campaign system should be able to track website visitors and figure out if they are coming from your email campaign. Your email design and imagery should be unique and relate to the product. All of this, in theory, makes sense and it might sound easy, but the reality is that not many businesses follow this kind of holistic approach.
What’s even better?
If you follow this strategy and it works, your ROI will be much higher than it would if you kept following a responsive marketing strategy.
You’ll be more in control of your budget, as you’re planning how much to spend ahead of time versus coming up with those decisions as they unfold.
Proactive strategy allows you to see into your company’s future better than reactive strategy does. You’ll be able to plan around expected performance, allocating resources, budgets, sales forecasts, and much more due to your ability to look down the road.
Ask Yourself: Where Are You Now? Where Do You Want to Go?
A good proactive marketing strategy will be holistic, taking into consideration all the resources you already have at your disposal. In order to know where you want to be in the future, you have to have a good understanding of where you are now.
You need to start by objectively asking yourself:
- Are my current marketing strategies really working?
- Am I really getting a valuable ROI in my sales and marketing tactics?
- Am I a step ahead or behind in my marketing strategies?
- If at all, how well am I adjusting to the results I get from tracking my campaign data?
While it might be hard to have these honest conversations with ourselves and team members, it is important for everyone to be on the same page and know where you currently are, whether that is ahead or behind where you expected to be at this point.
Once you have an understanding of where you currently are, it’s easier to understand where you want to go.
It’s fundamental that you set a specific goal that will not only meet your current needs, but will help you grow and benefit you in the future. Doing so will provide you with much more clarity and overall direction.
Where Do You Start?
At Deksia, our process begins with the information we uncover with our clients that we use to figure out who they are, what they do, where they’re succeeding, what makes them unique, and where we can improve their marketing and sales efforts.
We work with our clients to develop proactive strategies that employ effective tactics aimed at long-term success, with measurable results so we can figure out exactly what works for them.
We want to share that process with you, in detail, to help you start your strategy journey with the best foot forward to improve not only your sales and marketing team’s morale, but also your ROI and future success.
To help make this process a little easier to digest, we’ve broken it down into 3 exclusive keys for success.
Discover these 3 keys for FREE, and completely change the way that you think about your marketing by clicking this link.
To learn more, schedule a complimentary 15-minute consultation with the experts at Deksia today. Click the link below to get your marketing strategy started!
Finally, the path to successful marketing has never been clearer. What are you waiting for?