March 29, 2024

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Aligning Marketing Strategy with Campaigns and Advertising

strategy

Kelly is a digital marketing professional who runs marketing efforts for several small to medium-sized clients. Kelly prides herself on managing a large number of tasks and helping clients achieve their goals of improving their marketing and growing their customer base.

But something is bothering Kelly as she works through her task list. She notices that she’s been focusing a lot of energy on small projects for her clients, and she seems to have lost sight of how these smaller projects play a role in the larger marketing strategy for the client.

This is a common issue for marketing professionals. Marketing, being as multifaceted as it is, requires a lot of adjustment and a high level of management of many moving parts. This is challenging because often we lose sight of the “big picture” in an effort to focus on what’s directly in front of us at the moment.

But this issue needs to be addressed sooner rather than later. Rather than get stuck spinning her wheels, working on low-value projects, Kelly should take a step back and refer back to her clients’ overall marketing strategy. Each project, each campaign, each piece of creative needs to tie back to the main goal. If this doesn’t happen, the entire marketing strategy can be derailed.

Why is this an issue? Let’s explore a few issues with low-value work or with not having an omnipresent marketing strategy.

A ‘Big Picture’ Helps Keep Projects on Track

In marketing, particularly with smaller, startup type businesses, it’s quite easy to be more reactive than proactive. What does this mean? Essentially, many marketers find themselves jumping onto an idea that’s gone viral, they say yes to advertising opportunities that present themselves at the last minute, or they find that they are constantly playing catch up with ensuring a campaign is running smoothly.

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When a brand sets forth its marketing goals and the tactics it plans to use to accomplish them, it can be easier to differentiate between opportunities that play into this strategy versus those that won’t add value. It’s easy to get caught up a new project, but if it won’t play into the overall goal, is it worth the expenditure of time?

Low-Value Work Should Be Delegated

Delegation is a topic we often refer to here, and for good reason. Even for the marketing professional who works primarily on their own, there may come a time when some delegation is necessary.

Low-value work: tasks that are more tedious or time-consuming and don’t require a lot of creativity or deep focus — can often be a time suck. And for marketers, tasks that waste time are a death sentence.

Instead of spending hours on low-value work, consider delegating this. These tasks may play into the overall marketing strategy, but is it the best use of a marketer’s time? Not necessarily. Strategy and execution should be at the top of a marketing professional’s task list.

Marketers who keep too much focus on what’s immediately in front of them may see this detract from the overall success of a client’s marketing goals. It can be challenging to remember the big picture at all times, but taking care to do this will eliminate busywork, low-value work, and overall boost the effectiveness of a marketing professional’s work.