This blog focuses on marketing strategy, specifically choosing the most effective and most relevant marketing for your business. Whether your business is a startup, small-size or mid-size, or a larger enterprise, selecting which marketing is best for your business is not easy. It requires careful considerations and informed choices.

Businesses and organizations in private, public, profit, and non-profit sectors and across most industries, are finetuning their marketing to focus on today’s evolved market needs and opportunities.  Several considerations precede a choice and decision to ensure the most effective and most relevant marketing is selected.

With so many marketing choices available today, even a tenured marketer must carefully consider their options. In fact, a recent #Hubspot blog shares over forty options exist for marketing in today’s economy.

With thirty years of marketing, communications, branding and sales enablement strategy and decisions made on behalf of businesses in a variety of industries, I am frequently asked, “What is the most effective and most relevant marketing choice?”  I don’t intend to be evasive, yet my response is most often, “It depends.”  It depends! What kind of an answer is that?  It is the most truthful response there is.  Here is why…

Let’s start by looking at your business’ marketing model.  Are you marketing to other businesses (B2B), to consumers (B2C), through other businesses to consumers (B2B2C), or direct to consumers (D2C)?

The response absolutely affects your selection and decision on the most effective and most relevant marketing.  All these models share a common denominator in that each is marketing to people. Yes, each is marketing to humans with genuine pain points, needs and emotions. Yet, your choice and decision on the most effective and most relevant marketing is still influenced by your unique business and marketing model.

Diving deeper into the human beings that your business attempts to reach with your brand, marketing, and communications.  What do you really know about them?  I don’t mean just their name, company, job title, size of company, or their gender, age, size of household, household income, marital status, etc. I mean what do you really know them as a person and a human being. What are their hobbies, interests, passions? Do you know what motivates them? How do you describe their personal attributes?  Do you know their preferred resources for acquiring information on products and services?  Who do they trust or turn to when researching or considering potential products or services?  What are their most important personal or business interests?  Do you know what they truly value?

These are just some of the areas that we need to know about the human beings we are marketing to.  It is so important to know as much about them upfront and on an ongoing basis. Really and deeply knowing your audience is critical before investing even $1 into marketing.

The term ‘buyer persona’ as defined by #Hubspot, is often used today to describe the details of a specific buyer audience.  Whether you refer to this as a ‘buyer persona’ or not, the point is about getting to really know your target audience almost as well as you know yourself. This is ultimately what is most important.  As marketers, to select the most effective and most relevant marketing starts by first really knowing our buyer and influencer audiences.

Let’s step back a minute. I hastily jumped right into the topic of selecting the most effective and most relevant marketing for your business.  In doing so, I assumed that you already understand your market overall and specifically your market in 2021.  In other words, do you know your current market size and opportunity?  How has the market changed? Have your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats evolved based on today’s market. Equally important, what is today’s competitive landscape? How has the competition changed to adapt to the 2021 market?

If you have not yet answered these questions in 2021, this cannot be overlooked or skimped upon. Both the direct and ripple effects of COVID-19 has altered many markets. While it is tempting to jump right into marketing, gathering intelligence and insights is necessary to inform your choice of the most effective and most relevant marketing.

Now, let’s assume you have completed this and know exactly where your market now stands. Let’s also assume you have diligently learned and defined your buyer and influencer audiences in great detail. This is terrific!  If you have not yet done so, it is time to pause and invest in gathering this information.  Conducting research whether it be primary, secondary, competitive or a combo of all three, is necessary to gather the data, insights, and intelligence to completely define your market and competition today, and your audiences of today.

Are you thinking that you’re now ready to respond to the most effective and most relevant choice for marketing? Unfortunately, it’s too soon. In doing your research on the market, the competition, and your in-depth discovery and definition of the humans you market to (your buyer and influencer audiences), let’s also consider how effective and relevant your brand is in today’s market based on what you’ve now learned.

During my years in marketing, I have witnessed businesses come to realize that their brand and the perceived value of their brand have not stayed on pace or ahead in their respective market.  Rather than step back and address the fundamental brand issue, some chose to continue on with their marketing and communications.  The key takeaway from this is before jumping into marketing and communications, ensuring your brand is effective and relevant in today’s market is a critical step.  What worked five years ago or even one or two years ago, may not work today.  If your brand needs to be addressed, it’s so important to do this before moving forward with marketing.

With your brand in order, let’s return to marketing.  Before any decisions can be made on the most effective and most relevant marketing for your business, it is important to define the quantifiable and quantifiable outcomes that are desired from your marketing investments. In other words, what are the results/returns you expect?  How will you measure these to determine if the time, effort, money, and people that you are investing into marketing are most effective and efficient, and of course, most relevant to today’s market? If you have not yet taken the time to clearly define and state these desired outcomes from marketing, please don’t invest a minute of time or even $1 until this is first defined.

With all this in place, it’s time to look pragmatically at your marketing resources.  What available resources do you have in terms of people (employees and third parties)?  Where do their talents/skill sets lie relative to your current needs? Do they have the time available to devote to marketing? And, what is the available budget that you can devote to marketing?

Deciding upon which marketing is most effective and most relevant for your business is no easy task.  Taking the time to properly account for the resources-people, skills, processes, technology and financial that you need to support your marketing strategies and plan is critically important.  Your marketing cannot be executed and implemented in the most effective and relevant manner without the proper resources to support it.

Once you have assessed the resources that are available for marketing, do they pragmatically align with your stated goals and desired outcomes, or do the goals and desired outcomes need to be adjusted accordingly (up or down)?

All this time and effort that you have put into choosing and deciding your marketing strategy has not been in vain.  Collectively, it is leading you down the right path to make wise marketing choices.  It will ultimately let you decide in a well-informed manner which marketing is most effective and most relevant for your specific business.

When it comes to marketing, there are so many things to consider. Let’s also examine your marketing communications materials-print, online, social, etc. Are they up to date?  Assuming you will integrate these materials into the implementation and execution of your marketing, they need to be up to date, relevant and compelling. Do they offer a unique value proposition, positioning, and messaging both in content and compelling design to resonate and activate your audience in today’s market?

Here too, I have seen businesses attempt to take a shortcut by using pre-existing marketing communication materials. Despite knowing these materials warrant either a complete update or a refresh so the the look, feel and content adapts to 2021, they kept using them.  Without timely and compelling marketing communications materials, even when using the most effective and most relevant marketing for your business, your ability to achieve the desired goals will be compromised.

Before making your final choices and decisions on the most effective and relevant marketing for your business, we must also consider the sales function.  Do you have your sales channels enabled and fully optimized for working collaboratively and in lock step with marketing so that your decisions and efforts to market in the most effective and relevant manner empower sales?

Let’s be honest, marketing is important, but we don’t do marketing just for its sake.  The marketing, communications, and branding, we do is for achieving desired outcomes…results! The sales and client loyalty we ultimately build stems from our brand, marketing and communications working together like a well-oiled machine to enable sales and client loyalty and retention.

Finally, back to the original marketing strategy question. “What is the most effective and most relevant marketing for your business?”  Now that you  have taken the time and devoted yourself to the discipline that precede choosing and deciding on marketing, you are well equipped to answer this question. Your ability to do so lies with the wealth of fresh, timely knowledge you now have about your market, your competition and your audience—the people that you serve with a timely solution to their current problems.

This blog is not intended to be a sales pitch or leave you hanging in any way. Rather, it is intended to point out the importance of pursuing a disciplined process and deliberate approach to arrive at the right marketing choices and decisions for your specific business.  Today’s market is so different than even a year ago, so considering all these areas prior to making your go-forward decisions is so important to your business!