Can you relate to any of the following:

  • We are doing a lot of little things right, but we don’t seem to be making big business strides overall.
  • Our marketing initiatives seem disjointed and uncoordinated.
  • Our communication with leads and customers are often disjointed and uncoordinated.
  • The PPC program is great at brining in new business, but we don’t seem to be able to drive loyalty and repeat business.
  • We are making progress, but it isn’t keeping pace with what our competitors seem to accomplish.

If you are nodding your head “yes” right now, then you’re not alone. Most US based businesses large and small run into these kinds of hurdles from time to time. It’s not an indicator that you’re doing anything wrong with your marketing campaigns. In all likelihood, you are doing a lot of things right. Now it’s time to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

You need to determine how all of these great stand-alone pieces of marketing fit together to represent your brand no matter where the customer may find you.

In the digital marketing world, this process is called inbound marketing. Inbound is a holistic approach that takes into consideration your content marketing, SEO, PPC, social media, lead generation, email, etc. It takes all of the testing and learning that you have been doing and helps connect the dots in meaningful ways for your business and your customers.

Even though many businesses and, frankly, marketing agencies take on individual aspects of the marketing mix in a service by task approach, customers interact with companies as a whole entity.

Let’s start with content marketing and zoom out a little on the big picture.
I recently asked Bruce Gruen, Founder and CEO of Gruen Digital Marketing, for his thoughts on content marketing in this multi-device, multi-platform world of ours.

Entrepreneurs and all stakeholders need to understand that the process of quality content building is much more intentional than just posting lots of words on a blog with lots of pretty photos. Well crafted content builds the company’s credibility.

Thoughtful content also allows the marketing team to gauge and track prospect interaction with your content allowing a brand the ability to grow a prospect pipeline in a strategic manner. Over time, quality content will enhance the visibility of the brand which will afford more opportunities for meaningful growth.

As you can see, content doesn’t live in it’s own little separate space. Your messages impact every aspect of your business. That’s why consistent messaging across all of your marketing campaigns is so important to the overall success and growth of your business.

For those of you who take your content a step further and distribute it across social media, you need to follow through and pay attention to what community behavior signals.

When deployed with proper intent, social media is a signal generation tool that helps astute marketers build, gauge, and refine content that increases interest and visibility for your organization. Watching how readers use and digest quality content that is presented in social media will signal the buyer’s place in the sales funnel so that marketers can work to build more sales opportunities.

I’m sure by now you are developing a clearer picture in your own mind of how you can take individual marketing wins and merge them with other ideas.

Here are a few next steps to consider:

  • Put together a meeting of your internal marketing teams and get them talking together.
  • Evaluate historically successful campaigns for ways to expand those messages into other channels.
  • Revisit your analytics to find areas where traffic came in but immediately dropped off without further engagement.
  • Check with customer service to see if there are any customer pain points with communication.

When it comes to making big wins out of small victories, you need to look at the bigger picture.

Would you like to dig deeper into this topic? Our marketing consultants can help you evaluate your current situation and help you determine next steps. Contact us to arrange for a quick evaluation.