Marketing Strategy: The Big Mistake You’re Making (And How To Fix It)
Jul 23
One thing I’ve emphasized a lot on here is the need to be consistent when it comes to your branding. As in, you can’t just pick colors and fonts and logos at random and expect the ideal clients to start flooding your inbox! I mean, it sounds crazy, right? Same thing goes with your marketing… a random Facebook post boost or an every-once-in-a-while-when-I-have-the-time newsletter to your email subscribers isn’t gonna cut it. That’s why I’m so excited to introduce Mariah of Bloom Hustle Grow, and author of today’s guest post! She’s sharing her inside scoop on why consistency is the key to a successful marketing strategy.
Guest Post | Mariah of Bloom Hustle Grow
Let’s talk about consistency and how it impacts your marketing strategy.
Consistency plays a role in how you interact with your customers, what you post, what visuals you use, your marketing strategy, your content, and more. Consistency is what allows you to grow your business; it’s the underlying secret sauce to all your strategies and your day-to-day operations.
While consistency plays a role in many parts of your business, in this post we are going to focus on the role that consistency plays in your marketing strategy.
Why Consistency Is Important
The Marketing Rule of 7
There is a “rule” in marketing called the Marketing Rule of 7. Which states that a prospect needs to be exposed to your message (your company + what you sell) at least 7 times before they will consider buying. This “rule” was developed in the 1930s. Now the number of 7 is not the “magic” number; many studies suggest that the actual number, especially in today’s crowded market, is more like 20 to 100. This rule was developed to remind advertisers that messages needed to be repeated and repeated often.
It’s impossible to get anywhere close to this if you are inconsistent in your strategy, your branding, and in your execution. All three of those pieces work together to effectively reach your audience so that you are memorable.
Part of a strong marketing strategy is to have your brand stand out and for your audience to understand what your brand represents through you marketing efforts. But that effort is lost if you are inconsistent with your visuals, messaging and marketing efforts. Let’s dive into how consistency or the lack thereof impacts these three aspects of your strategy.
Your Branding Visuals
An essential part of having a strong brand is that your visuals are consistent. It harms your marketing efforts if your target market can’t quickly make the connection to your brand in the places that they interact with you online.
For example, if your website is bright and colorful, then it’s confusing if your Instagram feed is dark and edgy. Your potential customer is going to have a harder time connecting with you and your brand when they can’t readily visually recognize your brand.
A strong visual brand helps you make that instant connection with your audience. Our brains instantly connect with visuals before we read your message. If you don’t have that consistency in visuals, then it makes it that much harder for you to get a consistent message to your audience.
If your audience can’t make that easy visual connection, your written message is less likely to stick in their memory. Instead of building your exposure each time you post to your audience, it’s basically like you are starting fresh. Your audience has to work harder to connect your message to your brand without that visual cue.
Your Marketing Messaging
While visual branding is step one to a consistent marketing message, step two is consistency within your marketing messaging. Consistency in your messaging is what you are communicating and how you communicate it (your branding voice).
What You Are Communicating
It’s super important to have a focus on what you are promoting at any given time to your audience.
You shouldn’t one day promote your Instagram service and the next day promote your website building service. Those are two different messages, and your audience is less likely to recognize what you do and what you are an expert in when you bombard them with various topics and promotions.
While you might offer services for both, it’s better to choose one service to promote consistently for a quarter or month.
How You’re Communicating
How you say what you are promoting is also vital to building brand awareness and grabbing your audience’s attention.
You need an overarching message that connects your services in a consistent and cohesive way if you offer multiple services.
So instead of Instagram service and website building, you might position yourself as a visual branding expert or online visual marketing expert.
Take Action
Let’s do a little test, I often challenge clients with this, and I’m challenging you:
- Take a step back, but yourself in a new visitor’s shoes
- Glance at your social media feeds
- Answer this question, “If someone new landed on your feed by skimming your feed would they easily understand what you offer and your area of expertise?”
This also works for your blog content. Take note of your visuals too: are they helping your messaging, are they making an impact as you scan?
You can also go a step further and ask in a Facebook Group the same question. You have less than 3 seconds to grab someone’s attention, and you want to make sure you are making the most of it.
Executing Your Marketing Strategy
Marketing your business online is long-term strategy. You can’t write a few blog posts, post a few Instagram pictures, and expect clients to start rolling in. Even doing it every day for 30 days is not going to result in you seeing sales necessarily.
It’s vital to have consistency within your marketing strategy with your visuals and messaging, but it’s also vital to have consistency with the execution of your marketing strategy.
The online world is a busy, busy place; we are all bombarded by so many messages, products, and services each day. Because of this, our attention spans are shorter, and if you aren’t consistently showing yourself to your audience, you are going to be quickly out of sight, and out of mind.
No matter how good your message or visuals, if you aren’t getting them in front of your audience in a consistent way, they aren’t going to make an impact.
Now don’t read into that as you have to do all the things every day, but you do need to train your audience to know when and what to expect from you. And you do that by maintaining a consistent schedule with your posting and marketing efforts.
If you have struggled with maintaining a consistent marketing strategy or maybe even putting a strategy together, don’t fret! I have just the freebie you need, The Simplified Marketing Plan.
Download the workbook, and watch the video for each section as I walk you through crafting a focused marketing plan. For Trello fans, there is a template board that mirrors the workbook to help you organize your strategy.
As I mentioned in the introduction, these three areas are just the tip of the consistency iceberg. To really trust you and your business, your clients need to know what to expect throughout their interactions with you and consistency helps to build that trust.
After you conquer the tip of the brand experience (your marketing efforts) start examining your other client touchpoints for consistency. This blog post from Moriah is a great starting point to do that.
We often think that marketing is complicated, and it can be, but sometimes our struggles with it are more simple than we want to recognize. For my Grey’s Anatomy fans, “think horses, not zebras” when trying to diagnose your marketing woes. It may be something as common as lack of consistency that has your marketing strategy ailing. 😳
Mariah runs Bloom Hustle Grow, where she helps female solopreneurs beat overwhelm with the power of action by establishing strategic direction, crafting actionable plans, and building processes that all allow you to hustle easier. She has an MBA and BS in Business with a concentration in Marketing, and has spent many years saying and solving, “that’s a great idea, but how are we going to execute that?”
She lives in San Diego, California with her better half, Philip. She loves to travel (mostly to eat and drink), read, hike, and oh yeah did we mention the eating.
Mariah truly believes that anyone can bring their skills + talents out to share with the world and make it their business.
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