But the reason we use the phrase ‘joined-up’ so much is that to be effective your marketing needs to be consistent across your marketing mix, with all elements connected intelligently to support your overall business & marketing objectives.
Is your marketing joined-up?
These 5 simple questions will help you find out:
- Do you have a strategy?
One of the biggest barriers to joined-up marketing is the lack of a strategy. Without a clear strategy as to what you want to achieve and how you are going to market your business to achieve your goals, it is very difficult to deliver consistent, sustained and joined-up marketing communications.
Without a clear strategy, marketing usually becomes a series of disjointed activities driven by the Next Big Marketing Thing (Adwords, SEO, Social Media, Content Marketing etc. etc.).
- Is your branding consistent?
Even the smallest business has a brand and that brand has an image.
To be joined-up, your brand image should be consistent across all your marketing media:
-
-
- Website
- Printed materials
- Offline comms
- Social media
- etc
-
- Do you have a communication plan?
Do you know what you are trying to communicate to the market? Do you measure your marketing content against this?
When you put out a message through any media, you should be clear if and how that fits in with the brand that you are trying to build within your marketplace.
Furthermore your communications plan should look ahead to tell you:
-
-
- What you are going to say.
- When you are going to say it.
- What tools/media you are going to use.
- Who you are targeting.
- Why you are sending this message to these targets.
-
To be joined-up the plan should look at least 6 months ahead. 12 months is better.
- Do you stick at it?
When you commit to pro-active marketing communications (eg Email, Twitter, Social Media, Offline (don’t forget mailshot, telemarketing etc) do you then consistently feed this with great content?
It’s not so much about how often you communicate as being sustained in consistently putting out great content that reinforces your position as an expert delivering real benefit to your marketplace.
- Do you review and refine your activity?
A strategy and its associated communications plan are no good if they are written and then put on a shelf.
They should be living, working documents. Are you doing what you said you’d do? Is this getting you where you want to go?
Your marketing activity should be continually reviewed as a core element of your management process and refined & tuned as you get feedback from the marketplace on your activities.
Answer YES to all 5 of these questions & your marketing is truly JOINED-UP – Congratulations!
If you think your marketing could benefit from being more joined-up, give us a call on 01457 851111 or contact us here
