Even Rome Had to Be Rebuilt - Your MSP Marketing Might, Too

Recently, we wrote about how constructing a marketing strategy for yourself - more specifically, developing your brand - takes time. We ended that piece, Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day - Your Marketing Shouldn’t Be, Either, with a question: what if your new brand doesn’t work as well as it should?

It is important to remember that, as well planned and thought-out as Rome was, it still suffered a massive fire that required much of it to be rebuilt. The same could be said of your marketing, should it prove ineffective.

What if your carefully crafted and designed strategy doesn’t resonate with your ideal audience, the audience you want to be targeting? As promised, we’re back with the solution to this quandary. Fair warning, our first bit of advice may sound like a cop-out at first, but there’s reason for it.

Stay the Course

See? This sounds like we’re telling you to just ignore any possible problems. However, there is a reason that we are telling you to hold on for a little while before running back to the drawing board.

Remember the title of the first part of this blog, Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day. It takes some considerable time to build an empire, just like it does to create a reliable and effective marketing strategy and brand. Therefore, when we say Your Marketing Shouldn’t Be, Either, we mean it!

Remember, the point of your marketing is to build up your perceived value, your consistency, and your reliability. As it happens, all of these things will take time to build. Therefore, it is important to remember that when you build a brand and start your marketing initiatives, an audience isn’t included. An audience will develop when you earn them by (drumroll, please) reliably providing consistent value!

This is when marketing really becomes a long-term game, made up of a mix of short-term and long-term efforts. To fully leverage this combination, you need to make sure you are providing your audience with marketing content that suits this combined approach.

The easiest way to ensure you are doing so is to engage in something called compound marketing. Compound marketing is pretty much what it sounds like - small initiatives and endeavors that build up to create an impressive strategy and pristine brand. This ties in with what we discussed in the first half of this blog - you need to build a strategy and marketing approach to be taken seriously in the long term.

There are assorted marketing initiatives you can leverage to make this happen as well. Each of these initiatives should provide some benefit to not only your branding, but your search engine optimization efforts as well. You want people to be able to find the brand that you’ve built, and your ideal audience will most likely be the ones who stick around for the other marketing avenues you need to leverage.

Content

Your content is absolutely key to your marketing, as it is the foundation to just about every one of your marketing avenues. Your content is how your brand will be able to speak to your audience, whether it’s through the copy on your website, or the posts you share on your blog or in your newsletter, or the social media activity you generate for the followers that your brand collects, or the emails you send to your contacts. Your content is not only how you share what you offer and the benefits of your services, your content is how you let your brand speak for itself.

So to speak, at least.

It is only once you’ve allowed your brand to establish itself and have a chance to accumulate a following that you can accurately establish the quality of the relationships you have built, and if those relationships will prove to be profitable.

Testing Your Marketing and Revising Appropriately

Finally, if your brand is proving to be less effective than you had planned on, there are ways that you can help identify where the problems are.

The most effective means of doing so is to use A/B testing. By comparing the performance of campaigns, initiatives, and your other efforts put forth in different ways to similar groups, you can get a sense of what approach is more effective. From there, you can revise your strategy as necessary.

Setting benchmarks to reach at certain points in your campaigns can be another effective way to evaluate your marketing. If you don’t reach certain goals at certain points, some reexamination is probably warranted.

Remember, your ultimate goal should be to help your brand’s identity to become not only recognizable, but also trusted by the audience who you serve.

Now Go Get ‘Em!

It is true that some marketing goals are quicker and easier to achieve than others. However, building your brand (or even rebuilding it) needs the benefits of the influence and impact that long-term, extended activities provide.

Whether you need assistance with a long-term goal like building a brand, or a short-term initiative, we can help! Reach out to us at 888-546-4384 to talk to us about your marketing needs!