Making the time for a marketing strategy review is essential for all businesses big and small.
Why? Well, how else are you meant to know if the effort (and money) you are putting into your marketing is paying off? Dun dun dun…
So to help you on your journey to a full marketing strategy review, in this blog we’re going to guide you through the steps you’ll need to take. Huzzah!
3 Steps to a Marketing Strategy Review
It’s important to break down your marketing activities (and your overall strategies) into three different areas. These areas are your owned media, your earned media and your paid media. Let’s take a deep dive into what falls into these categories.
Step 1: Your Owned Media
In the ‘owned media’ bucket you’ll find some of your most precious marketing assets; things like your website, email list and blog. These are media sources that your brand have complete control over – you’ve purchased the domain name and hosting, designed your own website and built up search engine ranking over time.
No-one can take your owned media away from you, unless of course you forget to pay your web hosting bill!
With your owned media it’s crucial to keep your eyes on the results you are achieving with your strategy. This is the one media outlet that you have complete control over so it’s worthwhile investing time into learning what works and what doesn’t.
A few metrics you’ll want to know about your website and blog are:
* Unique visitors
* Bounce rate
* Monthly traffic
* Conversion rate (Google Analytics ‘goals’ are ah-mazing!!)
* Email list sign-ups – monthly or weekly
Usually you’ll use your earned and paid media to drive traffic to your owned media. That’s because your marketing and growth is much more secure when you don’t have to rely solely on wading through the choppy waters of changing algorithms and pricing changes for paid advertising.
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OWNED MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGY EXAMPLE:
Your owned media strategy should cover what audience you are trying to appeal to, and what content you will create and publish to attract them to your products/services. You will also need to include your frequency of publishing blog content or sending email newsletters to make sure you stay on track.
Step 2: Your Earned Media
Perhaps you’re reading this and going, “Hmm when is Mackayla going to hurry up and tell me about social media marketing strategy?!” and you’d be quite right to think that!
The truth about social media is that it falls into the category of ‘earned media’ because while you can ‘own’ your social media profiles you need to ‘earn’ the trust of people on the platform before you can grow a following and eventually, generate sales from them.
WOAAAH….*mind blown*
It is super duper important with your earned media channels you keep a close eye on your engagement rate above all else. Followers are great, but the key in converting people from browsers to buyers is keeping them interested in your brand and having it stay top of mind.
The higher the percentage of your engaged followers, the more likely it is that those people will turn into customers *and* recommend you to their friends.
Step 3: Your Paid Media
As you can probably guess by now what paid media is, right?
It is all those fancy pants Facebook re-targeting ads and Instagram lookalike audience campaigns you are running for your business! Wahoo!
Anytime you are paying to get in front of an audience whether it be online (Pay Per Click ads) or in a physical manner like in a magazine ad, these fall into the paid media space.
With this category your focus should be on getting the lowest possible cost per result. In other words, the highest possible return on investment (ROI).
New to the Paid Media Space?
If you are a wee bit scared to dive on in, it is *always* recommended to work with a proven expert in the field. They will cost you a pretty penny but they will help you to avoid common mistakes and ensure you are spending your money wisely.
Now that you are a master of the three types of ‘media’, you can really sit down and map out what marketing strategies you are already using for each category and you can make improvements and come up with cool tests that you can try to fine-tune what you are doing in all areas. Wahoo!
For more marketing tips check out the Plann blog regularly, we upload new content three times a week.
