Building a Cohesive Marketing Strategy

The importance of maintaining a brand consistency across all marketing channels should not be lost on anyone in a business. Whether a customer is visiting your website, clicking through a subscriber email, or seeing an ad on social media, the experience they have with your brand messaging should be consistent.

Having an effective branding and marketing plan can help you become more efficient with your dollars and your time. When it comes to integrated marketing, it’s not about each aspect of marketing thriving on its own; it’s about making all aspects of a marketing campaign connect to another. Here are the most important things to consider when creating a cohesive marketing strategy:

Build a Brand Guide

Every great marketing strategy should begin with a comprehensive branding guide that serves as a set of guidelines for employees in a company to ensure proper messaging. Whether it is a print ad or a webpage, following a branding guide you will ensure consistency across all platforms of marketing for your company. This document will serve as the end-all, be-all of how your brand is represented to the world.

A good brand guide has information about grammatical phrases, tone, and verbiage that can be used to represent the company across all channels. A brand’s life story should be included in the branding guide. By highlighting what led to the culmination of the brand, it can serve as reference for all employees future and present. It’s also important to include the approved colors, logos, and font style in the branding guide.

Find Your Target Market

Your customers are a crucial part of your company’s long-term survival. Before you can effectively sell your services or products to anyone, you need to establish who in the world would be interested in purchasing them. Determining your target market can be time consuming, but it's valuable to establish who they are.

The ideal target market is not a specific set of demographics, but more about who exactly it is you want to reach to have the greatest success. Determine what your target market does for a living, what their income is like, and how your products or services can help them. By creating a vision of who your target market is, you avoid marketing to customers who are not a natural fit for your brand, thus saving overall marketing dollars.

Know SEO

Some would say that traditional brick-and-mortar retail stores are dead or dying. And while that may or may not be true, the fact is most people search online before leaving their home to shop nowadays. It’s now as important as ever for people to be able to find you on the internet — just as it was once important for them to know your physical address.

For years link building got a bad rap due partially to the un-regulation that Google initially had on this practice. These days, it's seen as one of the best ways to gain organic traffic while also gaining internet authority. If you decide to take on SEO in-house, become familiar with good link building and learn to do it well. If you choose to invest in an SEO firm to help optimize your search ranking, make sure you see page-changing results within a year.

Website Content

The content that you have on your website is important to your customers. It’s possible that potential customers will peruse a website looking for information without actually purchasing anything, so the content on your website should be enticing to your customer. If you have great but relevant content with properly placed links to product pages, you may attract someone to buy even though that was not their initial intention.

Your website needs to be inviting to your target market. Creating content for your site that makes your brand immediately recognizable to consumers is the exact goal of any successful marketing strategy. By keeping your website in line with the rest of your company branding, you create a seamless, cohesive marketing strategy.

Email Marketing

Hubspot estimates that 3 billion people will be active email users by 2020. Having an effective email marketing campaign is not as much about how often your customers get an email from you, but how important the content in the email is to them.  

It’s important to note that not every customer's journey on your site and with your brand is going to be the same. You may find that a great email marketing campaign only leads to a few click-throughs onto your actual website. By mapping out your customer’s interaction with your brand and its website, you are able to determine the best content to send them.

When you are able to segment your customers, you can chose to group them based on money spent, recent purchases, length of time they have been a subscriber.

Don’t be afraid to A/B test your email campaigns in attempts to optimize your marketing budget. Most email marketing platforms inherently offer this option, providing analytics to back up email campaigns.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to the digital marketing. Giving individuals the opportunity to connect not only with each other across platforms and across the globe, but also with their favorite brands. Instagram ads provide social media marketers with a reach to a broad range of consumers for little effort or money. Advertisements like this allow a user to target specific characteristics of their consumers such as similar audiences, age groups, and location.

It’s important to determine your target audience, but it is equally important to listen to them. By focusing on the comments made on your social media accounts, you can typically pick up on and understand what your customers or potential customers are talking about when it comes to your company.

A great marketing plan comes from a culmination of many different aspects. By having all of these different sides of marketing in place, you ensure that the customer experience is consistent, making your brand recognizable.