Why Your Marketing Needs To Align With Your Content And Goals
Too many companies think that marketing is the publication of content that draws audiences into a brand. While this is a simplified approach, marketing does much more than this in many respects. And that is why numerous campaigns fail. Here are some of the ramifications of marketing without alignment to content or goals.
1. It Confuses Audiences
One of the first problems that you might find with your publication of content without alignment to your content or goals, is that people get confused by your message. The best marketing has one clear message and that is linked to corporate ethics and values. When you market a brand without alignment to content or goals, you risk creating a two-tier set of communications that can contradict with each other.
For instance, you could publish content on your social media channels about hot weather being a great time to buy and use your product. But then you could also have content on your website that links best use of your product in cold weather. This is a mismatch that will confuse audiences into deciding when your product is best used.
Another example is sending out an email that promotes a webinar, but sending them to a landing page that advertises an ebook. Audiences will not know what they’re supposed to be doing. This can lower conversion rates and waste marketing budgets.
2. You Can Promote To The Wrong Audience
When you don’t align your marketing to set goals, ethics, or content on your site, you’re likely to attract the wrong audience. This can be particularly problematic if your content is centred on a certain set of demographics. For instance, you might market to small business leaders but then have content that is more relevant to multi-national companies.
This mismatch harms a commercial reputation and you can see your future marketing endeavours ignored by both sets of audiences. It can also take a lot of effort to improve your reputation once it has been tarnished.
If you do get some of the audience who engage with your marketing to subscribe to further content, then all you’re getting is bad data. These aren’t the people who can benefit from your products and services or they might not be in a position to make a purchase. Further marketing to these people is just expensive and a waste of your precious time.
3. It Makes Work Harder In Your Organisation
Productivity in your business is another key aspect to profitability. The more staff can do in a given time, the higher the revenues and the more profit you can make. However, if they are dealing with miscommunications because marketing has been produced with the wrong focus, they will waste time correcting it.
In addition, staff want to know that there is a singular approach to work. It helps them be more focused and buy-in to brand priorities. This in turn helps you as it improves staff engagement, retention and quality of work.
Just staff leaving your organisation can be a major cost, but staff will leave if they feel the company is not aligning goals with marketing. The cost of replacing staff can be the equivalent of 18 months’ of wages.
Aligning Marketing With Goals And Content Is Easy
The truth is that aligning marketing with your goals and content is fairly easy. It is about writing down what is important to your brand and basing everything on that one philosophy. So, if you want to help customers cut the time they’re spending doing taxes, that is the focus you should have on your marketing. Or if you want to sell customers ingredients to help them turn bland food into spicy creations, you need to sell that benefit.
Focus marketing using content you’ve already generated and the goals that are in the heart and soul of your business. It will give you better results.
How do you align marketing with goals and content? What do you create first?
Let us know in the comments below.
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Making Email, Social And Content Marketing Work Together
Social media, content marketing and email marketing should support each other for you to get the best results.
Digital marketing is about attracting, convincing, and selling to customers. There are many ways to do this, but one thing has been clear for a number of years: that it takes more than one or two interactions to sell to the majority of customers.
In fact, research has shown that 80% of transactions are not made until the 5th and 12th interaction with a brand. This can be hard to achieve on one channel, which is why you need as many channels as possible, working together to create a sales funnel that creates those necessary interaction points as quickly as possible.
Why Use Multiple Platforms To Market Your Product
There are many who believe that one sales channel is their only way to achieve sales. However, this is a flawed system. If you used emails exclusively, you might need to send 12 emails to get them to buy. If you send one email per week, that’s 12 weeks to generate the sale, a long time, and that could mean you lose out to a competitor.
However, if you use a mix of platforms, you might catch the eye of the consumer at several points of the day. For instance, when they check in on Facebook and see some of your content (organically or paid) they are making an interaction.
When they are doing some research, with good SEO work, they might see some of your content on the subject and then read it: another interaction point. Therefore, when you next send an email, your potential customer isn’t just on interaction point one, they are on interaction point three or four.
However, if you don’t have these marketing channels aligned, you might be doing more harm than good to your marketing. Instead, you need to find a way to combine them into one campaign that’s mutually beneficial.
How To Combine Platforms Into A Single Campaign
The first step to combining platforms into a single campaign is to ensure that each platform is connected to the others. You don’t want each platform to just connect to another, you want to include as many platforms as you can from the other platforms.
So for instance, on a piece of web content, whether it’s a landing page, downloadable content, or blog post, you need to connect it to your social media accounts and mailing list. On your emails, you should direct them to a landing page and also social media profiles.
The challenge is on social media. Here, each piece of content should refer to just one link, e.g. a mailing list, or web content. But generally, with your social media campaigns, you should refer to all your other platforms equally.
You’ll then need to find a way to direct audiences to the next platform. This can be done with a good call-to-action. A good call-to-action should include:
• Urgency
• Definition of the action you want them to do.
• Time delay.
• An interesting offer and/or promise.
Finally, you need to consider how each piece of content is connected to the next. You want to take the customer on a journey where each interaction is another step in a single journey. So, if you sent an email about cooking a holiday meal, you could have call-to-action about the desserts or games for the festive meal. As long as it’s relevant and adds value for your customer, then you’ve got some good content. Here you have at least two interaction points.
Another good example of this would be offering people tips on social media about cooking, and linking that to a landing page where they can subscribe to a mailing list for ingredients, cooking instructions, etc. This scenario has at least three interaction points.
Therefore, by connecting marketing on all channels, you can cut down the time to sell from up to 12 weeks to under three weeks.
Conclusion
Selling online can often mean that you have as many as 12 interactions before your customer makes a purchase. This can take a long time if you only use one platform to sell. Instead, you need to combine social media, web content and email marketing campaigns to minimise the time it takes to sell to your customers.
Do you combine your marketing platforms? How do you ensure they are aligned?
Let us know in the comments below.
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