Managing and executing effective marketing strategies can be a daunting task, especially for family business owners juggling multiple responsibilities. However, with the right practices in place, you can keep your marketing efforts running smoothly, efficiently, and on a well-timed schedule. This article will guide you through the best practices to ensure your marketing strategies have effective goals and accountability behind them.
1. Set Clear Goals and Objectives
Identify Your Targets: Define what you want to achieve with your marketing efforts. Is it increased sales, brand awareness, or customer engagement? Before you begin to develop your marketing strategy, you need to know where you want to end up. What does success look like from your marketing efforts? Only when you define your successful results can you measure your efforts as successful or not. Once you define your success goals, be sure to share them with your team. If they don’t know what you are trying to achieve, they will not be able to effectively support your efforts.
SMART Goals: Ensure your goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
2. Understand Your Audience
Market Research: Conduct thorough research to understand your target audience’s needs, preferences, and behaviors. Let’s face it…consumers can be fickle, so it is important to understand their motivations on a deeper level. As a service or product provider, when you understand the root of your customer’s pains, needs, and desires, you can market your brand in ways that are more meaningful to them. Taking the time to understand your customers not only builds stronger trust but it ensures your marketing efforts are helping you to connect with your right-fit customers.
Create Buyer Personas: Use the market research conducted to develop detailed profiles of your right-fit customers to tailor your content and campaigns effectively.
3. Develop a Comprehensive Marketing Schedule
Marketing Accountability: It is important to have one key person who is responsible for the oversight of your marketing efforts. This is where a lot of family business owners get hung up. Having the right person in the Director of Marketing seat is vital to your overall success. If your business has no one managing your marketing efforts, or it’s whoever has the most bandwidth, then your marketing efforts are in trouble. Your marketing strategy and execution should be coordinated to connect across different channels, with the right type of content and design for each unique platform. Content should link together leading your audience to various information to help them make a purchase decision. And this all takes a person directing the work, reviewing the quality, and managing the execution.
Content Calendar: Be sure your Director of Marketing has a clear plan for your content in advance with a detailed calendar. This content schedule should include every marketing platform you are utilizing within your campaigns, such as blog posts, social media updates, email campaigns, promotional activities, etc.
4. Monitor and Adjust Your Strategy
Regular Team Reviews: It is important that the Owner or Director of Marketing reviews the marketing plan with the team members (whether internal staff or an outsourced agency) involved in developing and executing the marketing strategy. These meetings allow each person to discuss marketing efficacy, industry or market changes, and share their creative ideas together as a group. They also provide an opportunity for each team member to apply their unique expertise to the marketing plan.
Analytics and Reporting: Track your performance with tools like Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
5. Gain Continued Insights
Feedback Loop: Analytics can give you a technical overview of how your campaigns are running, but it doesn’t give insight into how your service is being experienced or perceived by your customers. Encourage customer feedback and use it to refine your marketing strategies and internal processes and communications that impact customer satisfaction.
Research Resources: Utilizing research tools such as Survey Monkey, Alchemy, or Quatric can help you attain quick feedback to direct questions. Additional resources to learn about your customer’s experiences can include review platforms such as your Google Business Profile, Glassdoor, and social media.
6. Collaborate and Delegate
Family Involvement: Family members take on leadership roles within areas they may not have direct expertise. Building a brand and developing marketing strategies takes a specific set of skill sets that often require more than one person to support those efforts. If a family member wants to be involved in the marketing process, be sure to identify their unique skillsets so they are serving in the right role within the marketing department. There are also many professional development resources available to help your family member gain the right knowledge and expertise to be a strong contributor to the family business.
Outsource When Needed: Consider outsourcing certain tasks to professionals or agencies to bridge gaps in skillsets and to ensure high-quality execution. It’s so important to have the right people supporting key brand positioning responsibilities.
Business Goals Need Accountability
Effective marketing management is crucial for the success of your family business. By setting clear goals, understanding your audience, planning meticulously, and having the right person accountable for your marketing success, you can ensure your marketing strategies run smoothly and achieve your business goals.
