What is the Best Marketing Strategy?

What is the best marketing strategy?

It’s a question I get asked an awful lot, sadly there’s no one-size-fits-all. Even if you have two businesses that are identical in every way, the business objectives, the owners objectives, the shareholders objectives could still be different. So for that reason you can have two identical companies have totally different answers for what the best marketing strategy is for them. 

There are lots of different agencies around in terms of marketing and they provide different skill sets; there are social agencies, there are video agencies, there are creative agencies, there are paid social agencies, I won’t name all the types here – some of them are good and some of them are not. 

One of the hardest things with anything you do in business is finding the best suppliers. 

What I mean by that is finding suppliers that are going to be able to work with you and deliver. One has to be careful dealing with any agency because you have to be sure that they’ll put your interests before theirs. That’s difficult because they’re in business and their primary interest obviously is to grow. You always have to make sure you get a second point of view, at minimum, from trusted sources who are channel neutral to make sure that you’re not being sold a solution that matches the agency’s objectives. 

If someone only does pay-per-click, and they recommend that pay-per-click is at the core of your marketing strategy, I would get second opinion on that. Because if they’re a bad agency – that’s what they would say. If they’re a good agency that may be exactly the right solution for you. 

So you have to be super careful when you’re trying to work out what is the best marketing strategy for your business. 

You have to keep your cards close, keep your own counsel and make sure you get that second opinion. 

Ultimately though you don’t know which marketing strategies work, and until you test it you’re not going to know the answer. 

There are so many variables in play, until you actually do it it’s very difficult to know whether it will work or not. It’s certainly very hard to work in a world of guarantees. 

If you can find an agency that will only work on performance related results – go for it. That doesn’t mean they’re any good, it could mean they’re desperate for the business, but it could mean they’re awesome. If they are awesome and they’re really good at what they do, they would probably want to charge for their time to some degree. Because obviously an awesome agency could do great work getting clients to your business. However well their marketing is that they deliver for you, if your sales team aren’t good at closing and you make no business out of it, you’re probably going to blame the marketing agency. 

You might be a very honest organization you might actually say actually it’s a sales problem, that would be the right thing to do, but not everyone is that emotionally involved in business and I’ve seen it happen many times where the marketing has been great, the sales follow up has not been great and you know the honest conversation doesn’t happen and the marketing agency gets the blame. 

So it is tricky and until you test stuff you’re not going to know for sure. 

The key therefore is lots of testing, you may have theories about what’s going to work based  on data or what other people are doing, which absolutely shortens the odds. But obviously make sure that you watch the numbers so that you can determine what did and didn’t work for you. That allows you to refine and to stick with the marketing campaigns, channels, methods that were most successful in the strategy that worked and it allows you to ditch and bin the stuff that was in the strategy that you tested that didn’t work. 

You might even choose to test the strategy with another agency, because you have the sneaking suspicion that your sales team are awesome and they close business all day and it was just wrong or poorly qualified leads coming in from marketing because the targeting was off. So there’s a lot of moving parts here. 

Ultimately it’s not black and white and so you have to have control of your marketing, in order to determine what the best marketing strategy is. It doesn’t mean you have to do more work, on the contrary, you don’t have to do more work, you just have to be able to own and control the work that’s being done. 

There’s a very big difference. 

Managing directors of businesses don’t do all the work, but they’re in control of the work that’s being done and the same is true in marketing. If you want to determine what the best marketing strategy is for your business, then;

You have to determine what the best marketing strategy is for your business. 

You have to do that. 

You can’t outsource it to someone and say I want you to determine what the best marketing strategy is for my business. Agencies can give you suggestions, but it’s got to be tested, it’s got to be honestly measured and you’ve got to have an honest conversation with yourself about where it fell over or where it succeeded. Because if you don’t have that honest conversation you may be getting rid of an awesome marketing agency supplier, you may have found the most honest, the most awesome agency in the world and they may have done an awesome job, they may have nailed the strategy but if your sales didn’t get the follow-up right, it’d be pointless to blame them. It’d be much better to fix the problem. 

On the converse obviously if the numbers are telling you that what the marketing agency is pushing into the pipeline isn’t any good, you’ve got to be able to have an honest conversation with the agency. 

You can’t do any of that if you’re not in control of your marketing. 

If you’re not in control of your marketing there is a zero chance you can get to the best marketing strategy without spending an absolute fortune – and even then the odds are against you. 

So if you want to figure out what the best marketing strategy is for your business, take control, do less work, be more effective, spend less on marketing and make more money from your marketing. I promise you it’s not rocket science, it is as easy as I’m saying. 

I absolutely delight in running single day master classes to show people how I do that for clients and what I do and how it works. 

I hope that’s helped, if you want the best marketing strategy for your business simple solution – take control.