What leads some companies to have better results from their marketing efforts than others? Marketing consistency is often a key, if not the separator between okay marketing efforts and ones that continue to generate leads and traffic.
Let’s take a look at the value of consistency in several aspects of marketing. Be thinking about your own marketing and sales enablement efforts in each of these areas.
| “Getting an audience is hard. Sustaining an audience is hard. It demands a consistency of thought, of purpose, and of action over a long period of time.” – Bruce Springsteen |
The Boss is right. Developing an audience is hard. Getting your target audience to notice you is even harder. It takes 7 impressions on average before someone will remember your advertising. So next time you think that you’ve killed it with that single great social post, sales cold email, marketing email, or ad, you need to remember that once is not enough to make a difference.
Solid brand development requires a commitment to consistency from the get go. Your marketing campaigns need to be planned as multi-platform campaigns whenever possible. And, make sure your branding is consistent across all platforms, campaigns, and across every touch point you have with your audience and customers.
Check out our past blog, Value of Branding at ALL Customer Touchpoints, for solid advice on where your business should employ consistent branding.
| “Success isn’t always about greatness. It’s about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.” – Dwayne Johnson |
The Rock knows that success requires a commitment to consistency. Successful marketing requires a commitment to crafting repeatable processes.
I’ll never forget my first marketing mentor explaining to me when working on a marketing campaign not to waste my time trying to come up with a campaign nobody has done before. He told me that being a successful marketer means not trying to reinvent the wheel — no one has time for that. Adapt an existing process, concept, or plan so that you can push marketing communications out faster and more efficiently. Work smarter not harder.
There are so many areas of marketing and sales enablement assets that lend themselves to replicable processes, designs, and templates. Here are but a few:
Once you craft the processes and templates, your marketing efforts are far more efficient and can be used more often.
One aspect of marketing consistency that rarely gets addressed, but as someone who has spent the past 25 years in digital marketing can tell you, is that marketing technology and platform proficiency plays a huge role in pushing out communications on a consistent basis.
Knowing how to take advantage of the various tools and platforms out there can help speed up your processes and make you far more efficient. CycleWerx has consolidated most of our marketing, web, and sales enablement efforts via HubSpot. We have one very robust dashboard that manages our CRM, marketing automation, and CMS (Content Management System).
As HubSpot Solution Provider Partners, we practice what we preach. I’ve used many different CRM, CMS, and marketing automation solutions over the years, but having one extremely robust platform to manage all of our efforts and every one of our clients marketing and sales enablement efforts from allows us to be very efficient power users.
We also take advantage of other planning tools and schedulers so that we can often load up content all at once and set it to release via email or social media throughout the week ahead.
Planning your content release dates in advance is key to putting out consistent marketing efforts. Creating and constantly using a content calendar ensures that you have the resources to support your current strategy consistently.
For CycleWerx, our team meets in advance to determine the type of content that we will put out throughout the month. Then, with our plan, we can create content in advance and save for release on certain days.
When your content strategy is laid out in advance it makes it so much easier to consistently put out branded content.
Imagine you planned that on the 2nd Thursday of each month you release a sales partner newsletter. Consider having:
With a process like this, it becomes dramatically easier to get content out consistently each month.
Content calendar’s help make planning your content strategy easier. For help creating a content calendar using a free tool that can be shared with different departments check out How to Create a Content Calendar.
Tip: Leverage your calendar to improve your relationship with other departments, by reading What the Heck is Marketing Up To? The Value of Internal Communication.
BTW a quick content strategy is to recycle older content and to share existing content several times. This is a great way to demonstrate brand awareness and to get your content in front of audiences that might not have noticed your content the first time.
A huge factor in being able to release content consistently revolves around time and resources available to you. For many growing companies, this is where the really serious struggle comes into play.
I see this happening all the time. Management has some great ideas for campaigns, but it is a struggle to get the resources to make part of this campaign happen. Maybe they do a great job getting out one version of the campaign, but they don’t have the time or resources to have the campaign repeat or to create several variations of the campaign.
I see two other issues growing companies often deal with, and they are the exact opposite of each other. Today you often have technically competent senior management who think that if they get the right tools in place then they can easily manage their marketing efforts without a dedicated team. This is always a short-lived strategy.
Senior management has a million other responsibilities in making their business grow. At some point they realize that the technology is nothing more than a tool, and a dedicated marketing and/or sales enablement resource is needed to get the most out of their sales and marketing technology investment. Without such an investment, they will never be able to consistently communicate with their audience.
The flip side of this can be a bit more discouraging. When you hire people to manage these communications efforts internally but don’t invest in the proper tools to help them do their job efficiently, everything is an effort and takes far more time than necessary to execute. Then your people spend far more time trying to execute and not having time to spend on strategy or creativity. It is extremely hard to put out consistent content without the right tools.
What in the world does reporting have to do with marketing consistency? A lot. Most everything in digital marketing can and should be tracked. If you set up a consistent reporting and analytics structure in advance, then you can track whether your sales and marketing efforts pay off and have the expected results. An alternative is to use a platform like HubSpot, which can automate this reporting.
Being able to quickly see which communications efforts have the most success can help you double down on those efforts or that type of messaging. Being able to view what messaging resonates with your audience can quickly improve your marketing consistency by allowing you to consistently deliver the type of information your audience seeks.
Does your business have what it takes to deliver marketing consistency? Have you addressed each of these areas that might hold back your marketing efforts:
If you are challenged with one or more of these areas consider reaching out to CycleWerx as a resource. Our team is skilled in helping our clients push out consistent, branded content, that gets them noticed and keeps their brand in motion.
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