What percentage of your marketing strategy gets executed?

50% or more? Are you able to ensure that marketing strategy worked out at huge executive cost and time gets translated on the ground? There are steps required to make it happen. The strategy should be worked into the creative output across various media – whether it is traditional or digital media. Then negotiations with media and figuring out the right ones to target. It’s not simple and the bigger the company and budget, the harder it is to get things going.

This is where HubSpot comes into the picture. Even if your website is not on HubSpot, you can begin by using the tools that HubSpot provides to test and validate some of the ideas and find out the traction it gets. Take the creative to work out options of landing pages. Use paid social media targeting to drive traffic to the landing pages. And see which approaches get the most engagement.

The idea is to make the strategy an integral part of execution and validate some of the hypotheses. There could be a customer promise that sounds great on paper but does not seem to make much impact. On the other hand, what is seen as an obscure customer benefit can be the one that customers are enthusiastic about.

Some strategies are pivotal

Western Union is one of the world’s largest companies transferring money between countries. But they did not start out doing that. They were a successful company sending out telegrams in the early part of the 20th century – as many as 200 million telegrams a year way back in 1929. Then, the market shifted with the popularity of telephones taking over the market and the need for telegrams dropped precipitously

Western Union had to find another business model and that was to move money around the world. As companies went global, so did supply chains, and the need to shift small and large sums of money increased. It helped, of course that they already had a relationship with companies due to the size and scale of their earlier business. But executing it was key.

So whether it’s a short-term strategy or a complete shift in the business model, it involves finding and convincing customers to change. That’s where the marketing of new services plays a crucial role. The shift does not happen overnight but seeing how the market changes and then adapting to the change becomes crucial.

Working out the steps

This move is always a single step at a time. The transitions must be planned. New customer segments have to be approached. This is where the difference between digital and the older forms of advertising comes to the fore. Digital allows for a graded and incremental approach to change. Large sums of money don’t have to be committed unless you know what’s working.

That patterns reveal themselves when customer interaction and engagement is tracked. If you haven’t heard of a brand called MVMT (from the word movement), you should. It is one of the world’s fastest-growing watch brands. They launched a watch on Indiegogo in a crowd funding campaign. The traditional watch market is not seen as high growth, unless it is smart watches, which Apple now dominates.

Their strategy was to build a watch brand entirely through social media. They created lifestyle work on Facebook and Instagram which drover a steady stream of sales of the product. Then, they used this traffic to build a huge email list that they now own entirely – and they are able to reach their customers and the networks of their customers through smart offers and interactions.

Almost all the work on social media is geared to get the direct emails of customers. That provides a way to stay in touch with them directly without having to pay for the interactions through social media. And that’s where executing the strategy is key. It has taken them from a launch in 2013 to over $ 80 million by 2021

The proposition that worked

The line the brand uses is that ‘Style does not have to break the bank’ Now that seems to be a proposition that resonates with their audience who are looking at watches that cost anywhere from $90 - $160

Any brand looking to grow this template can use HubSpot. Social media campaigns can be run from within HubSpot and the leads captured and tracked. Email marketing can be scheduled, messaging and creative tested as well as drip emails sent at pre-determined intervals for product categories that have longer nurturing requirements.

The important thing to note is that tech today implementing strategy is the only way to get results. And that’s what we advocate to every one of our clients. The gap between marketing strategy and tech implementation must be bridged. Every plan made must translate into action and then analysis.

If you would like to bridge the gap, please get in touch and we’ll show you how complex campaign requirements can be handled and set up with ease. We’ll show you the difference it makes when lead generation and follow up are effective.

What is essential is patience and iterative effort. For a detailed session on how this can work for you, send us an email at  info@blueoshan.com. Better still, book a call with our CMS consultants