3 Marketing Strategy Essentials: how to stay focused

We see so many companies chase the newest marketing strategies. These tactics aren’t necessarily bad – indeed, stuff like SEO, social media, and email funnels were “new” at one point and are now tried and true techniques for getting leads. And yet, if you haven’t answered three fundamental ideas for your customers it won’t matter what platform your marketing is on – it won’t be effective. It’s a waste of money to just switch platforms with the same old strategy that didn’t work last time. 

So whether you’re thinking of getting your company into the metaverse or you’re trying to stay on top of the newest Web3 development, you just won’t see the results you want unless you get the basics done. So what are those basics? We can sum them up in three words. 

• Customers
• Clarity
• Credibility

Customers: Put yourself in your customer’s shoes

Most marketing strategies are engineered backwards. We see it all the time. Companies like to focus on the features they offer. That’s natural, you see it as your strength, so you want to share that with potential customers. For an accounting firm that might mean talking about bookkeeping services or end of the year tax stuff. 

Unfortunately, doing that doesn’t really understand who it is that you’re talking to or what they care about. Here’s what your customer wants to know: What problem does your product solve for me? To answer that question you need insight into your customer. You need to understand who you’re talking to and what they care about. If you don’t do that leg work, you’ll just be left talking about your features – which is not nearly as effective. 

Clarity: Is your message clear?

Too many companies use jargon and technical language on their website. They shoehorn it into their emails and ads. Does it make you look smart? No. It makes you look out of touch, and it’s just not connecting. It’s not a problem with your industry, it’s just a misunderstanding of how our brains work. 

The human brain works extremely quickly at filtering out things that we don’t think are going to be able to help us survive or thrive. When it sees a bunch of jargon or technical words that it doesn’t understand, it doesn’t think, “Wow, this company seems smart!” it thinks, “NEXT!” 

If you don’t have clarity of message, you’re never going to be able break through the natural barrier that we all have. We’re so used to closing pop up windows, ignoring banners, and everything else you see on the internet that honestly the only way to break through to your customers is to show them something that will make their life better. That’s when they’ll pay attention. 

So how do you do this? Well, we use the Storybrand framework for clarifying messaging, we’ve used this with over a hundred companies – but it’s hardly the only game in town. We also recommend the book, They Ask, You Answer, which is really helpful in laying out a basic strategy to figure out what it is that your customers are wondering about when they come to your website. Long story short: It doesn’t matter how you do it, but you need your message to be clear. 

Credibility: You need to have some.

Of course businesses need to have credibility, right? But let’s get a little more specific. Here’s the main culprit in ruining credibility that we see with companies: branding and design problems. Almost weekly we see multimillion dollar annual revenue companies that have websites that look, well, not great, bob.

 It’s not like that website really says anything about the company’s ability to do the work, but it communicates that y’all really aren’t paying attention to what’s happening now. We think of it like an ill-fitting suit. When you show up for a big sales call, you might know everything about the industry, answer their questions, but the baggy suit is going to be what they remember. Don’t be a baggy suit person. 

That might sound dumb or shallow, but unfortunately that’s sort of how we as human’s operate. We want to see pleasing things, we assign them credibility. And with so many options for your potential customers, it makes sense that they’ll need to eliminate some based on aesthetics alone. Make sure your website keeps you credible. 

So before you get on yet another platform. Ask yourself if you’re nailing the three C’s of marketing fundamentals. If not, how do you get there?