April 27, 2013

I keep coming back to the same three pillars when developing marketing strategies. This is regardless of industry, company size, customer type, and channel. These pillars are awareness, engagement and innovation. There’s nothing complicated or ground-breaking here, just a simple structure I like to work with.

Awareness

Awareness covers all growth-focused activities, like attracting new customers and spreading the brand. Examples are SEO, paid search and press releases. Success metrics depend on the business model, but could include new registrations, total site traffic, search traffic, or social mentions. And yes, those are vanity metrics. Awareness on its own won’t lead to success.

Engagement

Engagement covers all conversion and satisfaction-focused activities. Engagement aims to move customers further along from having some initial interest to being paid customers and beyond. Examples are having a sales website, customer support, trial onboarding experience, and educational newsletters. Generally success metrics are paying customers, monthly/weekly active users and satisfaction scores, like net promoter score. Again this depends on the business model.

Innovation

Innovation is the positive reminder to solve my own problems. It’s very easy to copy what competitors are doing or what was in an article someone successful wrote. Common wisdom and current trends only go so far. Creativity and rigorous scientific execution are the next level shit.

All very straight-forward. It’s all about answering these questions:

• How will new people find out about my company?
• How will I convert them to customers and keep them happy?
• What best suits my budget, customers and company?