Turn the Table on Churn
The siren song of productivity, checking things off your list, and fulfilling requests is often just the vacuum of churn in disguise. Stakeholders may be aghast at the idea of halting what looks like perfect productivity—or not fulfilling those requests that are coming through more rapidly than fast-food orders. So how can you turn the table on churn and get out ahead of requests? A proper game plan can help you educate your business partners and provide you with a bit of breathing room in which to retool your process. Here are five principles that should drive every marketing effort you undertake—laid out in order of campaign strategy through to execution.
Build for a Purpose
What action do you want your potential customer to take upon being motivated by your campaign? And what KPI do you expect to be impacted? This action can be derived from the objective of your campaign. Maybe you need to get feet on the ground in a retail store—or perhaps you want to generate email address leads for a sales funnel. Whatever you’re objective, every time you make a decision for your marketing based on this need, you’ll increase your efficiency and effectiveness of your work, making those hours you’ve toiled away even more worth it.
Focus on Solutions
When asked, most of us will probably say that—of course—all of our marketing efforts focus on solutions for our clients, customers, or members. Without a system for vetting campaigns and accountability, our marketing tends to slip away from this approach over time. Our connection to solutions can become tenuous at best. The fastest test is to ask yourself what problem your headline promises to solve for your potential customer. Consider, for example, the headline “Austin’s #1 Auto Lender.” As a marketer for an auto lender may know that this means your organization has empowered Austinites with the liberating power of reliable transportation. However, your target audience likely hasn’t worked in the industry for years and won’t make that connection on their own. An alternative headline of “Putting More Austinites on the Road to Freedom.” This headline reframes the focus on putting your viewer on the road to freedom while making the fact that you’ve funded more loans than your competition as a supporting point.
If you get to the end of your campaign and realize you have no clear call to action, it may be time to take a step back to re-evaluate your objective and what you’re doing to meet it.
Build to Last
Awesome—we’ve defined a solution-focused approach to meet our customers’ needs and built a campaign strategy tailor-made to connect those customers with our product or service. Now come the creative bits where we start defining the art style used to communicate our message. There are times that you’ll want to do short-lived, time-specific campaigns such as holidays or consumer behavior habits like summer travel. However, in this article, we’re focusing on increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of your time spent generating marketing materials.
Let’s go back to that hypothetical auto lender and suppose that they have an ad buy in a local, monthly periodical. One way they might approach leveraging their ad space is by creating a new ad every single month. This isn’t hyperbole—I’ve had an employer who took this approach until I could show them another way. Operating like this is exhausting and depletes your creative resources at an unbelievable rate. Yes, every ad is different, but no ad is necessarily better than the last. Changing things up this often doesn’t lead to better results.
A more effective approach is to develop a campaign theme and core ad content. From there, you can produce four or so variations of the ad so that it can be refreshed quarterly. In the end, you and your team will have spent maybe 150% of the time and effort that you would’ve on one month’s ad, but you’ll have enough ads to run them quarterly and last the whole year.
Track ‘em All
The next step in making your marketing efforts go further is to make sure you can track it all. And I mean track everything. If you can’t track it and verify its effectiveness, it should not be part of your core marketing strategy. Tracking campaign data allows you to tailor your evergreen marketing efforts by channel and topic while letting you better handle off-the-wall business partner requests.
Let’s again visit that auto lender. Suppose the sales team asks for a year-long email newsletter campaign telling Gen Z why they should finance used auto purchases. With historical data, you’ll know whether or not that age group responds well to that product via that channel. Armed with that data, you’ll be able to have a better conversation with your stakeholder. You can acknowledge their need for getting younger generations through the door to build long-term loyalty and demonstrate your immense knowledge for marketing—positioning you as a partner rather than an order-taker.
Be Authentic and Honest
Last but not least is making sure that you are authentic and honest regarding what promise your organization can honestly meet. We all want to say we’re the most convenient, the fastest, and the best solution for everything. However, if we say we’re the most convenient but our customer onboarding flow makes them jump through hoops for days on end, our customers will discredit future promises we make in marketing campaigns. Instead, focus on what your UVP (unique value proposition) is—of course, after making sure that your UVP is actually of value to your target market. That latter bit requires some authenticity and honesty within the organization rather than externally.
Wrapping It All Up
I hope you find these principles helpful and can work them into your marketing framework. Whether you need consultation help righting a marketing ship going astray or need some extra creative hands to bring a campaign to life, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me for your next project (or even the one you’re working on right now).
