4 Marketing Process Elements to Activate Your Marketing Plan

A powerful, action-oriented marketing process is an essential part of every organization , and offers an enormous opportunity to differentiate and grow your business.

There are undisputed benefits to developing a marketing process— a marketing process activates the marketing plan, creates control, guides priorities, generates accountability and provides a way to measure your results— along with lead generation, sales, and customer service processes to grow.

The general rule is: the more you install a marketing process, the greater the return on your investment.

However, developing a marketing process with the tools, strategies and tactics you need is not easy. It requires planning, thinking time, ideas and installation, long-term vision, internal and external expertise and often a willingness to do something and get it done.

More than anything, it requires the ability to be patient. It takes a while for prospects to trust you, and if you change your marketing, media, and identity, you’re hard to trust. Success comes to those who begin with a plan, and have the patience to move beyond the need for instant results.

1. Plan your marketing using a strategy-first approach to clearly identify your target market, define your positioning and create an identity.

Discovering your target market or ideal customer is a foundational element of getting any business on track.

Your marketing requires a positioning strategy for success. You’ve got to carve out a mental position in the mind of your target market or ideal customers.

Your identity is everything a customer or prospect sees and hears about you and, most of all, what they remember about you. The basis of an identity is who you are and what you do.

2. Build a marketing foundation which consist of an online content platform, social media profiles and marketing content.

When I’m talking about an online content platform this is a digital property that you own – a website, a podcast, a quarterly magazine, a weekly newsletter, slideshare presentations, or even a TV show. You have to be the producer of the content and create an asset.

Social media profiles are a great place to start because that’s where the attention of ideal customers is shifting. It’s also very, very important to understand you don’t own these profiles, your’re renting them.

3. Implement and execute the marketing strategy with the right promotional and lead generation tactics.

Proper implementation and execution of today’s lead generation activates (no matter the size of your business) consists of always communicating, sharing information, and solving problems, all through an educational approach that blends the use of public relations, networking, referrals, and advertising.

4. Maintain marketing over the long haul by putting lead generation, sales, and customer service processes in place.

The main reason marketing efforts fail is because they require too much time.

How much of your employees or your time is spent re-inventing the wheel when it comes to your marketing and selling?

With marketing processes in place, everything you’ll need to attract, educate, follow up and convert a lead is right there. Organizations can even put tools and processes in place to automate many of their marketing functions.