Spoiler alert: that’s not a compliment. The “see what sticks” approach is basically marketing without a coherent strategy. You might have some sense of what general tactics to use, but without a deeper understanding of why they work, how to make them work, or when to use them. Worse, they’re all isolated and disconnected—not part of any overarching strategy or long-term goal. So while you might see some short-term results, the momentum tends to fizzle out. The “spray and pray” approach, meanwhile, is all about casting the widest possible net and blanketing the greatest possible audience with as much information about your brand as possible—even if 99+ percent of them have no interest whatsoever in what you offer. Billboards. Radio and TV ads. E-mailing everyone on your customer list every day with the same information over and over again. It’s an expensive way to market, and most of that money is wasted on the eyes and ears of people who were never your target customers in the first place. You might even lose the trust of some promising leads, or at least cause them to tune out. You might argue that spray and pray is a coherent strategy. But for the vast majority of businesses, it’s a bad one. So what is a good strategy? And how do you build one? Here are a few key steps to get you focused.

Think About Your Marketing in a Holistic Way

 

So at this point, you should have a pretty good foundation to start building some actual marketing plans.

• You’ve identified your top business and marketing goals with specific objectives
• You’ve analyzed your own strengths and weaknesses from a marketing perspective and compared them against your competitors.
• You’ve done your keyword research and identified some “hot” topics and keywords that you can build your marketing campaigns around.

Armed with this information, you should be able to narrow your focus and develop really specific, organized, and targeted campaigns that are going to give you the biggest bang for your buck. But you’re not quite done yet. Because even with this kind of data and organization, there’s still a real temptation to revert back to the “see what sticks” method, where everything is siloed and disconnected from everything else. Instead, you need to be thinking about your marketing in a more holistic way, with multiple avenues (content, social media, e-mails, graphics, etc.) coordinating and building on one another. That’s not to say you can’t have multiple campaigns running at once. You absolutely can. But everything should be done with intention. At every step, ask yourself:

In other words, whether a new potential client finds out about you from a Google search, or a social media ad, or a video, or anything else, it should all be written and presented with a unified message and voice. When you get all your marketing activities working together rather than independently (or, worse, contradictorily), amazing results can follow. But it’s hard work getting there! We can help.

At CP Solutions, we love rolling up our sleeves and building organized, customized, and effective marketing plans for our clients. We know and do it all—websites, content, social, video, SEO, and more—so that you can get full-spectrum digital marketing under one roof, with a single point of contact. Don’t make it harder than it has to be. Get organized and get going on digital marketing that really drives long-term growth and success. Call CP Solutions today.