How confident are you that you’re using the right marketing tactics in the right proportion?
Marketers and business leaders face a paradox of choice when it comes to deciding which marketing activities to invest in. But being selective with the marketing tactics which work best for your organisation gives you freedom to manage your time, reduce costs and increase the effectiveness of your strategy.
A simple tool which I’m finding increasingly helpful for organisations facing marketing overwhelm is an adaptation of the Boston Matrix and the classic priority matrix, which allows you to apply the principles of a balanced product or service portfolio to your marketing tactics to decide which you should prioritise.
Essentially, you plot each marketing tactic on a four-quadrant matrix according to the effort it requires (along the vertical axis) and its impact relative to other tactics (along the horizontal axis). With my free editable Canva template (also available in PowerPoint on request), it’s an easy three-step process.
Step 1: Define the stages of your customer journey
Firstly, you should list and colour code the key stages of your customer journey. This is important for checking that you’re balancing your marketing tactics across the whole journey and not putting all your focus on say the awareness raising stage and neglecting to convert or retain customers.
The standard customer journey stages in the template are:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
- Loyalty
But you may wish to edit the terminology of these or add others such as:
- Interested
- Onboarding
- Renewing
Step 2: Map your marketing tactics
The next step is to copy each of the customer journey stage buttons for each tactic you’re using at that stage and map them onto the matrix according to how much impact they have on your business goals, and how much effort they take relative to other tactics.
Some tactics might appear in more than one stage of the customer journey, for example LinkedIn; a LinkedIn page could be used to spark interest and encourage product consideration, and a LinkedIn group could be used to engage existing customers and build loyalty.
Step 3: Analyse your marketing tactic portfolio
To illustrate how you can work out which marketing tactics should be prioritised for investment both in terms of money and time, let’s take the example below.
- The top quadrant on the left represents the ‘star’ tactics: those that are delivering higher impact for relatively little effort.
- In the bottom left we have the ‘cash cows’, those more established tactics that don’t deliver a huge return but don’t consume a lot of time either.
- In the top right, we have the ‘question marks’ – tactics with the potential to have a big impact but require more testing and investment.
- In the bottom right we have the ‘dogs’ – the tactics that require a lot of effort but aren’t delivering.
If you consider your own portfolio in relation to the priority matrix then the stars become your ‘quick wins’ or top priority tactics, your cash cows are your ‘fill-ins’ – your second priority tactics, your question marks are your ‘major projects’ worth setting aside time and investment to develop and test, and your dogs are the thankless tasks you can probably decide to stop doing.
A note of caution: while some tactics may appear to have little direct impact on conversion, they will still be a vital part of the overall customer journey. Generally, a customer will need to see your brand at least 7 times before they convert, so it’s important to take this into consideration and not discount tactics prematurely.
In the example above, webinars might have been a star tactic for generating leads two years ago but now people are a bit fed of them and would prefer to go to face-to-face events; LinkedIn may be working well for lead generation (unlike Instagram) but isn’t so successful for retention whereas phone calls are great for this.
In this scenario, since face-to-face events have proved successful for generating leads you might decide to invest in more face-to-face events to up retention. You might also decide to stop spending time on Instagram, LinkedIn group management and Webinars and focus on the more effective tactics like phoning existing customers.
If you want to get started, all you need to do is access Glew’s free marketing tactic portfolio Canva template, login or create a free account, and start customising it to suit your organisation. If you’d prefer to edit it in Powerpoint, please get in touch and I’ll be happy to send you a template.
Ideally, this template should be completed as part of your organisation’s wider strategic approach to marketing. If you need any more advice or would like some strategic support in completing the template, please book a free half hour consultation today.