Is Your Company Abandoning Marketing Best Practices?

Contrary to popular belief, the basic principles of marketing have remained the same since the dawn of time.

“Marketing, eh? Talk about an industry that’s completely changed in the last few years! Did you have to relearn everything? How do you keep up with it?”

Hey, it’s a fair question. Social media didn’t exist in anything like its current state only ten years ago. Google showed up on the scene—and yowza, has it changed ad options today. The rise of the web and digital advertising have made things possible that never could have happened in the past.

All this stuff? Important. Critical for marketers to know and know well. Yet is any of this a core marketing tenet?

Nope.

Myth: Marketing Changes All the Time

First, no matter what sort of marketing channels are out there (social media and websites and digital ad platforms are called “channels”), successful marketing campaigns are one part of a strategy and plan that outline how a company will approach reaching its business goals through marketing activity.

A good strategy provides information on the market landscape, the competitive landscape, the target audience, and the key messages needed to compel the desired action from a target audience—along with the overarching framework the marketing team will use to build a marketing plan. A marketing plan explains what needs to happen when and with what budget to achieve the desired goals.

Having a strategy is the first core marketing tenet—and this best practice hasn’t changed for centuries.

The Core Tenets of Marketing Haven’t Changed

Just as the fundamentals of a marketing strategy are core principles of marketing, so are the fundamentals of a solid, effective marketing plan.

For a marketing plan to work well, it must build enough repetition of the strategy’s well researched and carefully developed key messages with enough frequency and with the right amount of reach to the target audience. And it must do it within the available marketing budget.

Understanding how to build a calendar of activity that gets in front of the right people where they live and work and experience the world is where staying abreast of marketing updates comes into play.

Marketing Channels Evolve Quickly

Marketing channels—the ways you can reach target audiences—evolve more quickly than the core tenets of marketing. You’re thinking of a channel when you think of social media, digital ads, and so on.

Just as with any knowledge-work profession, marketers need to stay abreast of changes. The evolution of marketing channels tends to be the tax-code and legal-precedent updates of the marketing profession.

How to Balance the Marketing Old and New

When you work with marketers, ensure that you have a team that understands how best to employ the newest channels out there—and ensure they understand how to use them in context of tried-and-true marketing best practices.

After all, someone may be able to use today’s in-vogue channel well, but this doesn’t mean he or she can employ it in executing a solid marketing plan in service of a well-researched strategy with the aim of efficiently and effectively achieving business goals. (Sound complicated? It is.)

We saw this mistake frequently at the advent of social media: Companies hired people who knew well how to use a social medium for his or her personal life and purposes—yet this person couldn’t see how to adapt the platform’s use to serve a bigger corporate goal in a way that produced measurable results.

Need Marketing Help?

Jumping into newfangled channels without a grounding in best practices will deplete valuable time and resources quickly.

Are you at risk of abandoning core marketing principles? Do you need help ensuring your marketing leverages best practices in the best way? Could you use marketing support through employing marketing packages that achieve your business goals in a straightforward way? Call FrogDog!