It’s the weekend. You have to go to a family reunion. Your distant relatives are hosting it far away, somewhere you have never been before. You pack your bag. You load it in your trunk. You get in your car and put the key in the ignition.
You have no GPS. You have no map in your glovebox. You turn your car on anyway. You start driving. You get to your destination on time, without direction.
The above story is ridiculous. There is no way you can get to your destination without any guidance. Before navigation apps on your phone, there were tiny GPS devices to mount to your dashboard. Before tiny GPS devices, there was MapQuest (audible groan). Before MapQuest, there were maps that you unfolded until they were the size of a small dinner table.
Likewise, you cannot go anywhere with your business without marketing blueprints.
What is a Marketing Blueprint?
Marketing blueprints have several elements and steps that make them up. Those elements work together to direct your marketing strategy. Your marketing blueprint will keep you on track effectively growing your business with your marketing plan.
Without a blueprint, important parts of your holistic strategy will fail. Say that you are in the throes of a new product launch. Who are you targeting as your market with this new product? Is it the same audience you have always directed your marketing efforts toward? Is it an audience you have never catered to before?
Either way, you cannot go in blind with your approach and expect the results you want.
As always, marketing and sales go hand in hand. With marketing blueprints, you allow your sales teams to meet and surpass their quotas.
Why? Because with blueprint marketing, you highlight your brand. You know your customers and what they want. When you offer a product of clear value to them, they need what you are selling to improve their lives. There is no other option.
Why Do You Need a Good Marketing Blueprint?
It’s time to go over the top eight reasons why your business needs marketing blueprints to shine.
What are the messages you want to send to your audience? How will they respond to those messages? General marketing blueprints cover all grounds of what to expect as a response to your marketing efforts. They can give you a timeframe in which you will roll everything out.
Inside your overarching blueprint, you will build those elements we talked about earlier. It will be your content marketing blueprint, your digital marketing blueprint and everything in between.
If that isn’t enough information to get the gears turning in your mind, here are more of the reasons you need quality marketing blueprints…
To Have Your Own Brand
It’s you vs them, right? It sounds bleak to the non-business-professional. But to you, to an industry pro, you love that. To an extent.
You love that you have to work hard to stand out from your competition. You love that you have to earn your keep and keep earning it and earning it. It’s exhilarating.
But only when your hard work pays off. Only when you get a slice of the pie when customers want to buy from your brand. What you offer to them matters, the content you put out matters and so does the channel you use to do so.
With so many tools and technologies out there to distribute your content, a lot of your competitors still go back to the same ones. This lends to an air of generic customer interactions. But customers are each unique, each wants to feel like you personalize their experience.
The messages you adopt from solid marketing blueprints help you to remain true to yourself and your brand values. This makes everything feel more real to your now-loyal audience.
With your blueprint, you can get to know your brand again. This means you will be able to develop a morale and values for your brand that you can build the rest of your marketing tactics on.
To Engage Across Multiple Channels
These days, we are all a part of a world that rests on the backs of multiple channels. You would be hard-pressed to find someone who uses one social media platform or one single channel to fulfill all their online needs.
This ready access to information means consumers are smarter. It also means they have a low tolerance for hold-ups or huge mistakes on the part of companies they buy from.
If you put out marketing campaigns across all those channels willy-nilly, you are part of their collective frustration. You need to target the right people at the right time and in the right place.
Someone who loves reading large-print romance novels and going to bed at 8 p.m.? They aren’t the kind of people who want to see a massive promotion for high-tech services clogging up their Facebook feed.
You end up hemorrhaging money while driving your ROI into the ground.
To make it in the digital marketing world, you need marketing blueprints. Your audience will repay you with top-of-mind awareness.
So You Can Set Up Your Revenue Goals
Money. You can’t live without it. Especially not if you run a business that needs revenue to grow.
As a business owner, you know your budget like the back of your hand. You know if you are hitting quotas and revenue targets. But a big problem with some business owners is that they either set unrealistic revenue goals or keep them the same forever. Neither works.
So how are you supposed to accurately predict your revenue? How are you to include all your expenses the right way? Why, with marketing blueprints, of course.
To Create Your Buyer Persona
Customers are the lifeblood of your organization. They bring in the cash flow that allows your business to succeed. But do you know them? Marketing blueprints help you to, by giving you a chance to create your ideal buyer personas.
Here are some of the parts you will define as you come up with your buyer personas for your blueprint:
- Demographics, background and preferred style of communication
- Characteristics, hobbies, interests and personality traits
- Desires, goals and obstacles that stand in their way
- How you will help overcome their obstacles with them
- Reasons they would not want to buy from your business
- Marketing messages you will send to them that will work
To Better Understand Your Customer’s Pain Points
Your potential and existing buyers have a lot of things they are grateful for and proud of overcoming in their lives. But regardless, they have pain points they still are working to hurdle over. To retain customers, you have to help them hurdle over their pain points with what you offer them.
Your marketing communication efforts must address their pain points. More than that, they have to give your customers an actual way to solve them. With the help of marketing blueprints, you will know how to take all the right steps to get there.
To Uncover Customer Perception About Your Brand
It is hard to imagine those huge companies like Apple, Tesla and Nike had to build brand perception. Sometimes it feels like those companies have been at the forefront of our minds forever.
To grow your own brand perception to new heights, you have to understand where you stand in the eyes of your customers now.
As far as marketing blueprints, you will ask customers to fill out a questionnaire. See how they felt about your brand in the past, how they do now and where they see your brand going in the future. Also send the questionnaire to your team members to see what their thoughts are.
To Build and Retain Your Customers Through Your Pipeline
Your customer pipeline first shows you how you will draw customer attention to your brand. Its stages also account for how you will generate leads, convert them into customers and retain them.
Pipelines need to work within marketing blueprints. For that to happen, you have to guide your leads through your pipeline with proper messaging.
Here are the four parts of your messaging strategy to define:
- Brand positioning
- Value proposition
- Tagline
- Stories/anecdotes
To Create Impact for Customers
How will you create an impact for your customers? How will you individualize your messages for them through genuine conversations?
Line those conversations up with your marketing messages, brand values and buyer personas. It will not be long before you start to create impactful, mutually beneficial relationships with them.
Conclusion
As you can see, everything has to align within your marketing blueprint. Your buyer personas, your messages, your content. Everything.
How do you manage to constantly align it all and see to the other aspects of your business?
Are you looking for marketing consulting firms? Ones that can help you with your blueprint and provide strategic marketing consulting services?
Turn to Business Marketing Engine. A top-tier and dedicated team comprises our full-service marketing agency. Our marketing blueprints help our clients to win every time. But it’s more than that. Because we build our own success from your success. We are driven with heart and fueled by relationships. We mean our relationship with you.
To build that kind of relationship, though, we need something from you. Can we ask you for a favor?
Click here to get started with Business Marketing Engine today.