An Effective Marketing Team Should Be Like A Swiss Army Knife

Image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay

By Katie Wojciechowski and Perry Rearick

On a scale of one to ten, how confident do you feel about the ways you're currently reaching your business's intended audience?

Marketing is about managing priorities—there are so many things you could be doing, so it's crucial to focus on what matters most. Your marketing operations should be like a Swiss Army Knife: ready to employ whatever tool or strategy matters most at any given time, and then quickly pivoting to what's next.

Tools Your Marketing Team Needs To Succeed

A Swiss Army Knife is a dozen tools in one—that's because a plain knife won't cut it, pun intended, if a screwdriver is needed, and a screwdriver can't do the job of a wine bottle opener, and so on. Likewise, you can't expect one singular marketing method to reach all the way across your intended audience in all phases of their buyer's journey. You need different tools for different segments of your audience.

Content: the Pocket Knife

Perhaps the most-used tool on a Swiss Army Knife, the pocket knife is like your marketing team's content. Content is an indispensable marketing tool: whether it's through a Google search, a social post click, or an ad, your content may just be the first encounter many potential customers and clients have with your brand.

Your marketing team should be well-versed in content creation, which starts with great copywriting, but can include user experience strategy, search engine optimization, and design.

Branding: the Screwdriver

Make sure your marketing team—whether it's in-house or through your chosen agency—are experts at tightening up branding and messaging. This plays out in everything from the images you choose for your blog posts to the copy on your home page's call to action (CTA). Consistency is key in all your branding elements, and good marketers will put in the extra effort to remain aligned amongst themselves in all visual elements and copywriting.

Social Media: the File

Just like the Swiss Army Knife's handy file, your social media efforts serve to refine and shape your business's voice. Your marketing efforts should reflect this! While social media efforts are usually top of funnel and the direct revenue results can be difficult to quantify, they are crucial to your overall brand voice and marketing success.

Campaigns: the Corkscrew

Pop open a bottle of intentional campaign planning! It's the juice that will flavor and power your marketing efforts. A good marketing campaign ties in your valuable evergreen content with timely messaging, served up via social and paid channels—and even press releases, billboards, or radio ads, if that's your style.

Your marketing team should not only be thinking about the perennial user experience with your site and product, but also the campaign messaging and methods you're going to use to reach new audiences.

User experience lens: the Toothpick

If you are bringing potential clients into your funnel, but they hit blockers toward the end of their journey, they can't find the call-to-action, or get mired in a confusing page on your site, your marketing efforts have been in vain. Don't let that happen! Use your toothpick—a user experience perspective—to pick out those blockers. Make sure your marketing team knows how to keep things clear at the bottom of your funnel: easy-to-use landing pages, clear CTAs, and good transactional email.

Reporting and Analysis: the Can Opener

You've created great content and put out a campaign you're proud of—now, it's time to open up a hearty can of marketing insights. Your marketing team should know how to quantify your efforts' success, whether it's by number of conversions tied to a certain channel, amount of leads generated, or something else that fits your business better. Reporting and analysis will help your team understand what is working well and what they should be doing more of.

Katie Wojciechowski is an SEO and content expert with experience in the online auto sales, vacation rental, and tech education spaces. When she’s not strategizing title tags and sorting spreadsheets, she’s playing with her corgi, traveling in her RV, or writing for fun.

Perry Rearick is the owner of the Mungadia Marketing Co. Whether seeking to attract the right prospects, engage target audiences more deeply, or build trust to overcome buying objections, Perry believes that effective communications can be the catalyst for success. When not in the office, you’ll likely find Perry in the beautiful Colorado outdoors hiking, camping or skiing.