The Three C’s that are critical to marketing success.

The Three C’s that are critical to marketing success.

There are three absolutely critical things that need to be well planned for a business to really succeed with their marketing.

It’s like trying to build a house: You need a floor, walls and a roof. The rest of the stuff is pretty important too, but if you are missing any of those first 3, the rest won’t matter as the house won’t even stand up!

1. Understanding who your Customers are - working through who your target market is, creating customer personas and understanding the typical customer journeys. This should be fairly standard stuff for most marketers, but often it gets overlooked. Take a moment to step back and make sure you have this nailed. Create one or more personas, give them a name, age, photo and really delve into their fears, frustrations, desires and how they are influenced – all in relation to your product or service of course! It really helps inform the next two C’s.

2. Creating a Content plan that resonates with your customers, so that we know that what we are putting in front of them is engaging and relevant. If we know who they are and what drives their decision making around our product or service, then we can create a simple content strategy that aligns with this, ensuring we are adding value to the interactions we have with them in a marketing sense. Then a simple content calendar can help us to plan out the weeks and months ahead while keeping us on track.

3. Knowing what Channels are best to use for your marketing and advertising that will be relevant to your customers. From social media to Google Search Ads, email marketing to website vlogs, each one has a different place for your business and more importantly, your customers. Understanding the job that each of these channels can do is the key to making sure our content gets to our customers in the right place and in the right context.

There is a fourth C, which isn’t part of the above but is equally, if not more important, and that is CONSISTENCY. You’ve got to be disciplined enough to do this stuff consistently for it to have a lasting effect. There are ways of making the consistency easier, but that’s for another post!