Strategic marketing is ensuring that your organization’s mission, values, and overall purpose are clear to everyone in the company. This includes making sure that internal departments and individuals know what their jobs are, how they fit into the bigger picture, and what rewards they enjoy through promotion or raises of responsibility.
It also means communicating these things clearly to external stakeholders like customers, vendors, and media. You can’t effectively do any one of those things if you don’t have clear goals and objectives!
This article will talk about some ways to organize an effective organizational marketing strategy. It will focus mostly on describing why and how creating an efficient operating system is important for business success, but it may also include tips and tricks for improving our individual performance as marketers.
Develop a marketing strategy that is consistent
As mentioned before, your organization’s marketing strategy is an integral part of your overall business plan. It is what guides you in spending money to promote your company and its products.
Your organizational marketing strategy can be broken down into three main areas – product, service, or category. These are typically determined by which products and services your company offers, as well as what level of competition there is for those offerings.
For example, if your company makes skincare products, then creating a skin care marketing campaign would be considered a product-focused marketing strategy.
If your company provides consulting services, developing a promotional campaign targeted towards professional consultants would fit under this area too. And if your company sells gadgets, then launching a new smartphone advertisement would go under product marketing.
The important thing to remember about these types of strategies is that they should be consistently applied across all departments and individuals at your organization. This way, no one feels like their ideas aren’t heard, and every department knows how to apply this theory to produce results.
Make it visual
It is very common to see large corporations establishing brand campaigns, marketing strategies, and messages that are heavily focused on telling others what they should know about their product or service. While this is totally fine if you work for a big company that can afford such advertisements, most people do not have access to important information about the world around them and will likely ignore your advertisement, no matter how effective it may be.
As we live in an increasingly connected society, however, this cannot continue. Technology has made it possible to reach out to other individuals at any time, and with anything potential life changing. This includes advertising!
Businesses must adopt organizational marketing as part of their marketing strategy if they wish to succeed in the future. As opposed to making expensive television adverts or buying billboards, organizational marketing does not cost a lot and can easily be adapted to fit into almost anyone’s schedule.
What is organizational marketing?
Organizational marketing is when an organization reaches out to members of its community to promote its services. These could range from direct interactions like asking questions at a lecture or event or posting about products online, to more indirect interactions like reading business blogs or keeping up-to-date on social media platforms.
The main difference between traditional marketing and organizational marketing is that traditional marketing focuses more on using paid resources to get attention, whereas organizational marketing uses unpaid ones to achieve the same goal.
Create promotional materials
After you have identified your target audience, determined how to reach them, and researched potential vendors, it is time to create some promotional material!
When creating marketing materials such as flyers or advertisements, make sure they are relevant and interesting to your targeted audience. Use appropriate fonts and lengths to ensure people can easily read the information you want to convey. Make sure everything has proper spelling and grammar and that nothing looks too repetitive or boring.
After having done all of this, now edit and revamp these materials until you get a good feel for if they look professional and catchy! Sometimes things need several tries before looking their best.
Distribute promotional materials
One of the most important parts of an organizational marketing strategy is distributing appropriate promotional material. This can be done in many ways, but one of the best ways to do it is via social media!
Running out of promo items is always a problem, which is why having a large pool of resources is very helpful. By creating accounts on several platforms (like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.), you’ll have access to all those products.
Your followers will help spread your organization’s name by “liking” or commenting on these materials.
Personalize marketing
A personalization strategy does not mean doing things to gain more business for your company, it means offering products or services that match what someone wants or needs.
This is very important to note because some of the other terms used in this area like motivational speaking and direct sales seem to use “personal” as more of an incentive than actually promoting products or services.
By using these strategies, you can boost customer loyalty, increase repeat purchases and generate new customers who are interested in what you have to offer.
Connect with your audience
A successful marketing strategy is one that resonates with you, not the other way around. Yours should be simple and straightforward, but fun!
Marketing strategies that work are ones that bring out a smile on your face. They’re smart and effective, but most of all they make you feel good about what you’re doing.
That’s what really matters at the end of the day. If a campaign makes you feel stressed or overwhelmed, then it’s time to implement something new.
You have to love what you do to keep loving it for longer. When you find yourself getting into the same rut every day, creating an event or activity that you look forward to is the best way to change things up.
It can be anything from attending a conference to watching a movie you’ve been wanting to see forever to reading a book you’ve been thinking about for weeks.
Your audience will notice and form opinions based on those actions.
Be consistent
Consistency is one of the biggest keys to success in marketing. This could be your advertising, messaging or promotional strategies that you use repeated multiple times.
Consistency can be seen as boring at first, but it is what people have come to expect from you. If you are ever changing things up, you will lose trust with your followers/customers.
It’s like if I went into my favorite restaurant for lunch and they put spinach instead of mashed potatoes on my burger every day. After several attempts, I wouldn’t order their food anymore because it was no longer delicious. — Meghan, Millennial marketer
If someone ordered your product before, they may not feel invested in buying it since nothing has changed about its image. Changing something about the way you advertise products makes customers feel more connected to you, which creates a lasting effect on sales.
You don’t need to do a big event-type campaign every month, just keep developing your brand and promoting yourself. On a daily basis, add some value to the community and grow your online presence.
Measure your success
Let’s look at this from another perspective – what are you measuring? Are you tracking how many people view your website or how many conversations you have with friends via Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels about your business?
Are they listening to you talk about your products and services in various settings? If so, great! But if not, that’s okay too. You’re still leaving money on the table, but you’ll just need to be more creative about it.
The most important thing to remember when organizing an organizational marketing strategy is to simply start where you feel stuck and take action towards creating change. What works for someone else might not work for you, nor does it matter unless you implement it.
What matters is that you keep moving forward and learning as you go.
