No room for guess work in marketing
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Your seven steps to marketing heaven
Let’s imagine we have two drivers of identical cars embarking on a journey from Manchester to Glasgow. One plots a route, the other ‘plays it by ear’. It’s probably safe to say, the driver with a plan is more likely to enjoy the smoother journey and arrive before their fellow traveller.
So, if you are taking your business on a marketing journey, you need your roadmap to be thoroughly researched and plotted. There’s no room for guesswork when it comes to a marketing strategy – especially in today’s economic climate.
As a full-service marketing agency, we asked our team of experts to come up with the perfect marketing strategy. Here’s their seven steps to marketing strategy heaven.
1. Research
Conducting research should be the first step to any marketing strategy. It allows you to make more informed decisions – from market trends and competitors to customer insights and needs.
The marketing mix – known as the 4Ps of marketing – is the place to start to understand what you are marketing and where. These are the 4Ps:
- Product – this is the item or service you offer to satisfy your customers’ needs and wants. It’s important to identify what differentiates your product from those of your competitor(s). It’s also important to determine if other products or services can be marketed in conjunction with it.
- Price – what consumers are willing to pay for your product. We need to consider costs related to research and development, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution – also known as cost-based pricing. Pricing based primarily on consumers’ perceived quality or value is known as value-based pricing, and quite often explains why consumers are prepared to buy a more premium-priced product than a cheaper alternative.
- Place – where you sell your product. Is your product best being widely available, or would it be better to be sold in selected stores to maintain the premium perception?
- Promotion – the activities that will sell your product. This might include advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, and public relations. It is important that we consider budget available to pay for the marketing mix as that will determine the places to promote your product and how often.
By collating that lot, a fully-fledged marketing plan will start to take shape.
2. Guesswork
Cornerstone has forged an unrivalled reputation for providing full-service marketing expertise and creativity in support of the leisure and wellbeing industry, working with several local authority leisure trusts and associated organisations – many of which have come to us through word-of-mouth recommendations.
This journey began with Oldham Community Leisure (OCL), our very first leisure client, which soon sparked interest from others seeing their activity take place.
David explains: “We’d been working with OCL for a while and we wanted to do more but they’d always had an incumbent agency, it was difficult to break through that because lots of other trusts were using them. But OCL kept pressure testing us and every time they did we exceeded all expectations, met ridiculous deadlines and did a cracking job.
“We finally made the breakthrough, and that was quickly followed by work for Active Tameside, and then Link4Life. Everybody Leisure came on board in 2016 and then we were recommended to Burnley Leisure and Culture (BLC).”
Our leisure portfolio now totals 15 and is growing fast thanks to word-of-mouth recommendations.
3. Spend and return on investment
Let’s just dwell on budget a little longer. Namely, does your budget match your objectives/goals?
For example, without the funds, you can’t advertise on the right channels and create the right content to have the powerful impact you’re looking for. Getting a high ROI isn’t cheap.
But don’t forget, a strategy can start small with a hyper focus on one or two goals and build in more as the ROI is generated.
And because not all marketing is focused on products, customer-service businesses rely on other marketing tools that include three additional Ps:
- People, your people, who interact with customers.
- Processes that creates a seamless customer experience.
- Physical evidence, or the area where customers and company representatives interact.
All of these tools are used to promote a product or service and build brand awareness and customer loyalty in order to generate revenue for a business.
4. Knowing your competition
Keep your enemies close is a cliché that springs to mind here. The more you know about yourself and your competitors the better able you will be to serve your customers.
After all, how can you differentiate you and your product(s) from the competition if you have not identified them and analysed their offer?
You might say you already know the competition, but there’s no harm in taking stock as part of an informed marketing strategy. By doing so, you might uncover a surprise product or service capturing the attention and engagement of a customer group that you consider yours.
5. Knowing your customers
Identifying the personas of those accessing your product or service in another important factor that takes the guesswork out of your marketing strategy.
What do we mean by personas? Here’s how personas are born:
- Behaviour – brand loyalty, channel preferences and traits such as shopping habits.
- Demographics – the age, gender, education, location and profession of your customers.
- Psychographics – the study of consumers based on psychological characteristics and traits such as values, desires, goals, interests, and lifestyle choices. Psychographics in marketing focus on understanding consumers’ emotions and values, so we can market more accurately. The main types of psychographics are interests, activities, and opinions. It’s why your buyer buys.
- Lifestyle – non-work factors such as hobbies and pastimes such as going to the cinema or eating out for example.
6. Content
A lot of work has gone into this stage of the process, so it’s critical we create content that resonates with your customers.
Quality content is creative, relevant, valuable and engaging to boost brand awareness, sales, conversions or loyalty.
The competition is fierce across all formats. According to HubSpot Research, ‘half of marketers are using videos, with 47% leveraging images, followed by 33% posting blogs, articles, infographics (30%) and podcasts or other audio content (28%).’ Of these, video has the highest ROI.
Let’s recap how we got here. Your content is based on:
- Your goals/business objectives
- Understanding your audience
- Setting an affordable budget
7. Metrics & Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
We’ve saved the best until last. Every marketing strategy must include metrics and KPIs so we can understand how well your strategy is working.
Metrics and KPIs relate back to your objectives/goals. They are based on:
- Determining what your KPIs are going to be in the first place – so you can evaluate performance and progress.
- Choosing your content channels.
- Deciding on the type(s) of content to create.
- Creating and distributing your content.
- Analysing and measuring the results against a set number of actionable benchmarks.
Delivering for all of Be Well’s marketing needs
As a full-service agency, we have all the tools – expertise and creativity within design, digital, marketing, PR and content creation – to deliver everything a marketing strategy needs.
In this example, we were tasked with creating a marketing strategy that would seamlessly deliver for all of the needs of Wigan-based leisure trust Be Well, the local council’s new holistic approach to health and wellbeing.
Our strategy included:
- Development of campaign themes and concepts.
- Internal and external communications.
- Increased social media presence, including web banners, email headers, app banners, social covers, a social calendar and PPC assets.
- PPC campaigns.
- Email marketing campaigns for membership retention, referrals and acquisitions.
- Printed assets including flyers, posters, outdoor banners, pull up banners and exhibition banners.
- Press activity including print and online advertising.
What has our work achieved?
The following statistics from our digital team reveal the impact our work has achieved for Be Well. Between June and November 2022, Be Well’s Facebook reach increased by 134%, with even more impressive figures for Instagram, which saw reach increase by almost 600%, impressions increase by 589%, and profile visits increase by 66%.
Website clicks have increased by 1,000% and the number of followers have increased by 24%. Twitter retweets (the sharing of Twitter content) increased by 77% and the number of followers increased by 19%.
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Take a look at what we do.
What our clients say about us.
We’re proud of our extensive experience and expertise, but don’t just take our word for it. Here’s what our clients say about us.
We’d been really careful and thoughtful about our criteria and brief, and felt Cornerstone hit every single point, coming across in a down-to-earth, practical way while still showing understanding from strategy through to tactical execution. Our overall experience with the Cornerstone team is great because we feel really supported as a team.
Alison Robb, Cheetah Transformation
We have developed a great partnership with Cornerstone over the past 6 years and their dedication to our marketing needs and website development is evident in all aspects of our online presence. We appreciate their attention to detail and creative approach to all aspects of the business and look forward planning our new initiatives together.
Scott Bryce, Burnley Leisure & Culture
Cornerstone are a unique PR/ Marketing Agency who provide one of the most competitive holistic services versus many competitor agencies. The team are knowledgeable in their field of expertise, enthusiastic, fun, extremely creative, always ahead of the game, and great at managing tight deadlines. I would recommend this agency with no hesitation, their work speaks for itself!
Rekha Joshi, Dexcel