Experimenting with new marketing ideas can take your business to the next level, but there is plenty of groundwork needed before you’re ready.
Every marketing strategy reaches a point when it’s time to shake things up and try something you’re not already doing.
At Assemblo, we call this the Forefront stage, which follows the Foundation and Fundamental steps in our three-tiered approach to designing an effective marketing strategy.
The Forefront phase is all about trialling new concepts to see what can enhance your existing roster of fundamental activities.
If you want to get better value from your marketing budget, you might want to tweak your targeting or messaging through a special promotion or offer.
Otherwise you might want to add an entirely new component to your fundamentals mix, whether it’s trialling a tool like marketing automation or a testing a new medium such as a niche publication.
It’s also an ideal time to launch new products or services, or test whether a specific market exists.
The Forefront is the place when you can maximise your marketing dollars with bold changes and big campaigns — all informed by data collected from your previous activities.
Here are some unique examples of marketing practices and tools that may not be part of your marketing fundamentals:
Assemblo produces a custom print publication, The Camberwell Citizen.
Custom publications
Custom print publications such as exclusive newspapers or newsletters are an effective way to grow brand awareness and establish your business as a market leader.
If you haven’t tried niche publications before, they can target certain audiences and frame a brand as an authority in a particular field or location.
A custom publication that Assemblo has produced is the Camberwell Citizen, a quarterly custom newspaper focused on Melbourne’s Camberwell area and surrounding suburbs.
Advanced data analytics
Marketing strategies should already have basic data analytics set up to track your initial activities.
Advanced data analytics techniques go beyond simply tracking data, allowing you take full advantage of the data at your disposal. If you’re not already using them, consider using tools like heatmaps and live recording to see what your users are actually doing on your web pages.
Data can help inform businesses about customer behaviour on and off their website, which can highlight how people arrive at and move through the site. This data can help you develop powerful marketing automation processes to leverage these insights.
Marketing automation
If you are new to marketing automation, it involves using software to automate marketing activities and make life easier for you.
One example of marketing automation is email marketing, where you can create personalised and highly-targeted email campaigns through your CRM or programs like Campaign Monitor.
Keep in mind that email marketing automation isn’t about blasting your audience again and again with the same email.
Effective email marketing automation might send an email to your customers with a link to a special offer, based on the pages they have visited.
A few days later, your campaign would send a follow up email only to those people who clicked through to see the special offer with an e-book about the product, and so on.
And there’s more
Have you tried brand partnerships? How about custom videos or new events?
Experimenting with these advanced tools, methods and ideas can really boost your marketing efforts, especially when you have an expert leading you through the process.
Assemblo is a full-service marketing agency based in Melbourne, and we can guide you through our Foundation, Fundamentals and Forefront stages to make the most of your marketing budget.
To find out how we can help your business grow, give us a call on (03) 9079 2555 or drop us a note via our contact form below.