In my last article, I wrote about the importance of process in your marketing efforts. Process helps you limit the unknown and makes your marketing results more predictable. Simply having the process is not the end goal, however; the process needs to be tested and tweaked all the time. Everything changes: consumer behavior, technologies, your team, etc.
Therefore, your process needs to be adjusted accordingly. In most cases, only one or two variables will need to change in your process, so it is not necessary for you to reinvent the wheel. Let’s take the process used in Social Media marketing as an example:
We don’t research content for our clients’ social media accounts randomly. We have a process. We use a specific plan for each client and know ahead of time what type of content we will be sharing next week or in two weeks. We may not necessary know which article we will share or what specific questions we will ask, but we know what that that piece of content will be about and what it needs to accomplish. There is logic behind each step we take.
Every couple months we look at this part of the process, analyze what worked and what didn’t, and then we focus more on what has been proven to work well.
For example, when working on a marketing campaign for a client in the medical industry, we posted similar types of content each week, e.g. medical research articles. Through testing, we found that sharing a short description with a link and an image worked better than sharing a description and link without including an eye-catching image.
Later on we took it one step further. We used two posts with similar descriptions, links and images. For one post, we used a traditional teaser, but for the other, we tested including a question relevant to the content being shared. The second approach consistently outperformed the first.
Every marketing campaign and industry is unique. Do not take someone else's stats and instructions as a Bible. Rather, use the information they provide you as a starting point. Your business and audience is different from theirs so what works well for them may or may not work for your business. The process of testing different techniques will show you what works best for you.
Don’t under estimate the power of process in your marketing campaigns. Once you have your process down pat, you can focus on improving it. The process will evolve over time. Some things will change, but the essence of your strategy will remain the same. You marketing process can be as simple as using shampoo: lather, rinse, repeat.
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