As anyone in the marketing industry will tell you, marketing is a carefully considered process, not just a smorgasbord of knee jerk activities.
Your success hinges on your marketing process, the set of steps that you take to execute your marketing plan, with the overriding goal of attracting interest in your products, services or brand. It is about making sure there’s a clear methodology in place to complete the various goals most seen as critical to successful execution, including:
- Defining a mission statement
- Setting KPIs and objectives
- Conducting analyses of your offering and audience
- Developing a comprehensive market strategy
- Building your marketing mix
- Executing work across your various channels
- Measuring and reflecting on results
The 5 elements in the marketing process
The marketing process can be divided into a five-step model:
The marketing process model
- Situational Analysis
- Objectives and KPIs
- Marketing Strategy
- Marketing Mix
- Execution and Adaptation
Situational analysis refers to the foundations of your overall plan – this part of any marketing process is where you scrutinise the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and more across your brand, product or service. This gives you fundamental information which you’ll use to present your offering in the best possible light.
Your objectives and KPIs are what you hope to achieve as a result of this marketing process.
- What typical increase in sales do you expect for your product or service?
- How many leads do you want to bring in?
- By how much do you want website traffic to increase? What is realistic?
The marketing strategy process is creating a plan of action for how you intend to realise your objectives. This is where you’ll define your audience, consider appropriate activities and position your offering to give it the best chance of succeeding.
The marketing mix process meanwhile refers to how you manage the variables under your control in promoting your offering to your audience. This is of course the famous 7Ps:
- Product
- Price
- Place
- Promotion
- People
- Process
- Physical
Finally, execution and adaptation is essentially putting the planning and preparation you’ve conducted earlier in the marketing process into action – creating, posting, sharing, sending, installing and uploading everything across your various marketing channels.
Then, it is analysing the impact these had in relation to your objectives, and making recalibrations if and where necessary.
Though there’s a significant number of steps involved in the marketing process, each one lends itself to leaving the biggest positive impact on your audience.
Subsequently, finding ways to streamline this process, without compromising on the thoroughness or quality of your output, is important to turning around work efficiently as part of your marketing efforts. Below, we break down 9 ways this can be accomplished.
9 ways to streamline the marketing process
1. Create a shared terminology
Within your team, you might refer to certain words and phrases that relate to part of your marketing process. But it’s possible not everyone on your team is clued into this terminology, or the context in which it’s applied.
So, to save you the time of people sending emails questioning an acronym that was used in your last meeting or miscommunicating information because they didn’t understand the term used, devote a window of time to brainstorm and set in stone your terminology for your marketing efforts.
Also, look to encourage a culture of asking more questions. Sometimes people can feel afraid to ask the meaning of something they don’t understand if those around them seem to grasp it. Make sure your team understand that there are no ‘stupid’ questions. It’s much more valuable for everyone to be on the same page, and preventing teams from going down the wrong path because of a blip in communication.
2. Don’t shy away from setting goals
Everyone knows the importance of setting goals as part of the marketing process. But not everyone is as clear about the best way to go about it. Establishing these in a simple yet effective way will help the wider team get to grips with what needs to be achieved. After all, how will you know if your efforts are succeeding or failing?
Establish SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely) goals at the outset of any project to ensure that all actions are working towards a clear objective, keeping everyone’s focus set and making sure all future adjustments are made promptly and smartly.
If your team has clear goals in mind, they can feel empowered to make tweaks that they believe will make a positive impact, rather than shy away. And, not all goals will be achieved overnight, so make sure stakeholders are aware of this and that you can provide them with a timeline of when they can expect to see results.
3. Establish service-level agreements
Developing a service-level agreement (SLA) between your marketing team, third parties and other relevant areas of your organisation documents the objectives each should be fulfilling, so nothing is left open to interpretation.
Again, this small investment of time early saves even more time down the road by keeping every person involved in the various elements of the marketing process in sync and accountable for what they need to deliver.
4. Collaborate at every opportunity…
Collaboration is key. Especially in a multi-location company, maintaining communication between everyone involved in your marketing process is essential to avoiding pieces falling out of place and, consequently, deadlines being missed and work not achieving the correct quality.
Introducing collaboration apps and additional systems across a range of platforms will help make significant time savings and avoid mistakes.
5. …But give your team the tools to work independently
While collaboration is important, having to organise a meeting before every step of the process or cluttering inboxes with emails can be just as big of a drain on time. So, it’s equally as important that members of your team have the capacity to execute each task self-sufficiently, without risk of repercussions.
That is one of the key elements of BAM by Papirfly™ – by establishing clear templates and briefs for your team members on marketing best practice, on-brand content can be delivered day-to-day in line with your visions, without having to resort to lengthy approval processes or futile meetings.
6. Keep key information accessible
Employees not being able to find information like brand guidelines or the assets they need to deliver a project can burn through hours in the working day. In fact, 19% of a typical worker’s time is spent looking for files!
Placing your most crucial documents in a central resource (another strong feature of our solutions) is an effective time-saver, as well as useful to ensure consistency and quality is maintained throughout the steps of your marketing process.
7. Use templates whenever possible
Templates are not a cheat, but a crucial support for both time and consistency reasons. If your marketing teams are commonly using the same type of material as part of your strategy, why constantly go back to square one in regards to content?
Instead, utilise templates and make minor updates to these when required to save time and energy when executing your plan – plus, it will normalise how your audience anticipates content from you.
When we say templates, we aren’t talking about everything looking the same. They need to be intelligent and intuitive to allow you the flexibility to make studio-standard marketing materials, without compromising on things such as culturally appropriate imagery, layout tweaks and resizes.
8. Bring automation tools into the mix
Investing in marketing automation tools is a valuable way to shed time off your marketing processes. The effort it can take to market your company on the wide range of platforms available these days is difficult enough as it is – and manually it is practically impossible.
If you want to regularly connect with your audiences and work towards your KPIs, automating various aspects of your process, be it emails, social media, lead generation or another component is an increasingly pressing need.
9. Recycle successful material
Finally, in a similar vein to using templates, if a particular piece of content or design you’ve used has delivered results, tweaking this and reusing it at a later date saves time on creating a whole new piece from scratch – especially one that you don’t have solid evidence of it being successful.
Plus, your audience may have grown significantly since the first time around, or perhaps many of them missed it the first time around, so there’s an opportunity to generate even stronger results.
This alternative approach offers a greater layer of security in terms of success, as well as substantial time savings for your team.
Maximising your marketing process
Now you have a deeper understanding of the importance of the marketing process and techniques you can use to speed things along, you’re well-positioned to make your approach as efficient as possible. But, while you have the knowledge, it’s essential you also have the tools.
At the heart of Papirfly is a desire to transform the way businesses approach marketing forever, empowering their whole team to turn around studio-quality assets in a matter of minutes. BAM by Papirfly™ gives your team the ability to create, educate, manage, store & share marketing materials on a global scale, helping you accelerate your marketing process.
Get in touch today and find your freedom.