From the outside, effective marketing looks effortless. Effective marketing looks like a company engaging in casual conversation with its tribe. Effective marketing material looks ad-libbed and off-the-cuff. When a company has effective marketing, the images and language looks thrown together by someone with a perfect grasp of the company’s cultural values. They didn’t need to think about it. They live their company culture to an extent that choices are obvious and natural.
Yeah, that’s all an act.The rare brand getting away with truly spontaneous content creation has that spontaneity built into their brand. They do exist, but they’re rare.
Most companies rely on deeply prepared strategies for their marketing.In the long run, the fact is all effective marketing requires a strategy.
There are two levels to all effective marketing:
What you’re saying. Your content.
Your distribution.
Content creation is creative and exciting, and for some people it’s the easy part.
But it is only half.
Without a good distribution plan, it doesn’t matter what you say or how cool your visuals are or how well you’ve formed that clever joke. Nobody will ever see any of your marketing without a well-conceived strategy for distribution.
Strategy: infrastructure.Strategy is lining your tools up to accomplish goals by deadlines.
It’s getting your people, your apps, your timelines, all lined up to execute on accomplishing your goals.
Tactics: the doing. Check back here. We’re going to be running a series of articles to help you build your strategy so that you can get set up to execute your tactics
