Your marketing team has a lot of goals to keep in mind. Color schemes for images, target audiences to focus on, and content schedules to plan all occupy their days. While these things do require their attention, there’s one word you need to engrave on everything your marketing team does: relevance.
Being relevant means being top of mind with your customer. When your customer has a need, your brand is the one they think of. If you’re able to cultivate relevance, you’ll acquire more customers and retain them more easily because of the importance your company has in their lives.
You can make relevance the watchword of your marketing team by taking these five steps:
We all know the customer should be the focus of your marketing team, but it’s easy to succumb to “inside baseball” thinking. Sure, a certain photo edit or video cut might look cool to you, but will it resonate with customers? To achieve relevance, what they think has to matter most.
Let’s say you’re head of a marketing team for a computer company. Consider what your customers are looking for when they select a computer. Do you cater to well-heeled power users or students who just need a reliable piece of tech for an affordable price? Use your knowledge of your customer to make yourself relevant to the right demographic.
Your marketing team also consists of consumers. Ask them about the brands they love. Why are these brands relevant to them? Understanding that connection between customer and brand will enable your team to work its magic through your company’s marketing campaigns.
Forget motivational landscape posters and “Live, Laugh, Love” signs. What your marketing team needs in its workspace is the word “Relevance” in plain sight. With this word in front of your team members every day, orienting your marketing strategies toward relevance will become second nature.
A reminder can be anything from a Post-it note at every desk to a hand-painted mural (if you want to go all out). Add a relevance focus to update emails and team newsletters to really drive the message home.
To make relevance the watchword of your marketers, set goals to help them get there. Goals give your team a target to work toward, and they enable you to make a plan with actionable steps. This is just as much the case with instilling a relevance mindset as it for any other goal you wish to pursue.
Make goals challenging, but not too difficult to reach. Starting with a week’s worth of social media content is a good way to get your team’s feet wet. At the end of the week, compare the new relevance-based content with past content to gauge the differences.
While your marketing team members will likely prefer to be creating content, some marketing research can really help them understand relevance. Other brands are already doing well on this front, and you can learn a thing or two from their campaigns.
Make note of how competitors are adding relevance to their marketing strategy. How has their content evolved over the years? How are their engagement rates? Identify what works and what doesn’t so you can emulate a winning strategy.
As you implement the steps above, track the data of your updated campaigns and strategies. This way you’ll be able to visualize the progress your team makes by emphasizing relevance. The more success you see, the more relevance will become a part of your team’s ideals.
Focusing on relevance should show up in increased engagement, sales, and customer retention. As your brand becomes more relevant in the life of your customer, it only makes sense that these numbers will go up. Walk your team members through the analytics at your next meeting to show them exactly what they’re able to accomplish with a focus on relevance.
Once relevance is the watchword of your team, be sure to monitor how it changes your marketing for the better. Continue to work on relevance until your brand is a leader in its industry.
