Changing your perspective on familiar settings is fascinating. It’s why everyone wants the window seat on a plane or why a pair of binoculars can keep a kid entertained. It’s fun to look at things in a different way like looking down from an airplane on the streets you only ever see from the ground.
Getting a fresh view can be fun and helpful for your marketing strategy, too.
Your marketing strategy is always in a bit of danger from a limited perspective. It might be a social campaign that never took off, but you may not know if you never dive into the analytics. Or you may get overly focused on one channel, such as email marketing, failing to consider how that marketing format might pair effectively with another channel.
Let’s dive into a few different views that may offer better insights into where your strategy should be headed.
Under the Microscope: It may be disturbing, but you just have to look. Gazing down the eyepiece of a microscope can reveal some interesting things, and it’s important to dig into the details to the granular level with your marketing.
- Look into your website traffic patterns. Are there places where visitors click away? You can drill down to see patterns of user behaviors to determine where your website could use some design improvements.
- How about social media? If your goals are well-developed, you should have some coordinating metrics that allow you to measure whether you’re meeting those goals.
- SEO: Where does your page rank in search engine results when people conduct searches related to your industry or brand?
When you dive in at the microscopic level, you may be able to make small adjustments that deliver big results in areas like web traffic, social shares or search engine results page listings.
A Bird’s Eye View: As a marketing strategy matures, you can become a bit robotic. You schedule the posts, publish your email newsletter and send out the promotional postcard. Check. Check. Check.
This approach to marketing starts to feel wooden. Your audiences could tune out because you’ve tuned out and nothing feels authentic anymore.
This is when it makes a lot of sense to take an aerial tour and consider how your strategy is faring. Are there new trends or platforms you should be exploring, and are your channels still working well together? Is there a way to inspire some new life in your campaigns?
The Perfect Excuse for a Cannonball: Making a connection with your audiences means understanding the emotions behind their purchasing decisions.
This requires a view that resembles diving underwater to see what is going on below the surface. Your customers aren’t just making a purchase; they are satisfying some emotional need. It might be a need for security, a desire for freedom or a longing to experience luxury.
Understanding the emotional connection helps you develop effective storytelling techniques and further sketch your buyer personas. Your messaging becomes more effective because you are tapping into that emotion behind the purchase.
3D Glasses: They’re not just for the movies! You need 3D glasses to see where your marketing strategy lacks depth.
There are many areas where this is effective:
- Fleshing out your brand identity. Maybe you have a color scheme and a logo, but you’ve never thought about the values your brand encapsulates or the tone of voice your brand should use in communications. You’ve never thought about the personality of your brand—what your brand would be like if it were a person.
- Adding video marketing to your strategy. It adds a lot of depth to any marketing strategy because audiences connect so quickly with visual, dynamic content.
- Considering how to make interactions with your brand more of an experience. Are there ways to interact with your product on your site, or do you have how-to videos available? Maybe you need a fun social campaign to help audiences feel that they’ve “met” your brand.
This kind of depth is the difference between good marketing and great marketing.
And Finally…The Eye Exam: Number one or number two? A or B?
Finishing your eye exam requires some expert-level comparison between two options that are nearly identical. In your marketing, you need to be able to do some testing to see which options are working, which aren’t.
A/B Testing: One of the best ways to see what’s working is with simple A/B testing. You just run side-by-side campaigns and make one simple change at a time to see which is performing better. You’ll find out that your audience likes the word “discount” better than “sale,” or that your color scheme on your landing page should be blue and gray, not green and gray.
Agility: Be ready to MOVE. Great marketers use analytics and testing to see what is working, and they make changes when necessary.
At SJC Marketing, we aren’t afraid to look, whether it’s a peek in the microscope or getting a broad view from a plane. We can help you change up your perspective, then adjust your strategy to see improved results. Contact us to get started with a conversation about your business!