Marketing engine? What? Why?
A marketing engine or ‘model’ or ‘system’ is the proven way to profitably market your brand / business. It’s a hugely valuable asset that pays dividends in the short, medium and long term.
‘Proven’ means that it delivers. This means that time, money and expertise have been leveraged to try different channels, methods and activities, products, pricing and communication to figure out what works, what doesn’t and why. Defining it is a big deal. It means that you have discovered the secret to focusing marketing investment to deliver profitable, sustainable growth.
It plays a significant role in maximising the value of your brand/business on sale too. Why? It’s a framework that a buyer can plug investment into to profitably scale the business.
What business would you pay more for; one that has worked out where and how to invest marketing budget to deliver sustained profitable growth?
or one that hasn’t worked that out, so needs more investment and resource to define and prove it?
3 steps to building your ultimate marketing engine
#1 – Designing the engine – Attraction and retention strategy
This is all about how your business / brand will strongly connect with the most valuable customers that resonate strongly with what your brand does best.
This is how your brand goes-to-market. Marketing strategy and plans. It’s everything to do with creating and maintaining the valuable experiences that the most valuable customers love and want more of.
There a few – typically 4-5 – critical tasks that your brand needs to tackle to effectively make that strong connection and consistently attract and retain the most valuable customers. I’m talking the high level tasks, like;
- Establish and increase awareness
- Be found when the customers need what your brand does best
- Be desirable
- Be credible
Be clear about how your brand will consistently tackle these types of tasks.
#2 – Building the engine – Choosing and testing the components and how they work together
This is about implementing the strategy. It’s a learning journey of exploration, trial and error, test and measure, to find out what works best. Step by step, each marketing engine component is designed and built to play its part in strongly connecting the most valuable customer groups to the brand.
Using the performance data created by running each part of the engine and crucially, how they all come together, will inform the ultimate design and optimal running of your marketing engine. Always think ‘joined-up’ marketing, so the engine produces maximum power to propel your brand and business forward.
#3 – Fine-tuning the engine – Diagnosis informs the tuning
This is about taking a holistic perspective of how well the brand is consistently attracting and retaining the most valuable types of customer. It’s not just about the performance of each marketing engine component, it’s about how they all come together to produce strongly recommended customer experiences. These strongly recommended customer experiences create future streams of the most profitable revenue, filling your business with the right customers, who love what the brand does, want more and more, are least price-sensitive and typically strongly recommend to others like them.
Fine-tuning your marketing engine is also about balancing the investment levels to maximise return. This is about balancing the ratio of customer lifetime value and the cost of customer acquisition. You may well be aware of this ratio. Has it become one of the main metrics used to ensure your marketing engine is fuelled effectively, to produce maximum power output to produce profitable growth in your business?
Take a moment to reflect on the marketing engine in your business.
Is it running, or perhaps never quite making it out of the workshop?
How’s it running? Does it breakdown frequently or seem to be constantly back-firing or not running right?
Possibly your marketing engine seems to be running well but you know that there must be more potential power in it. So how to unlock that marketing engine power is the question that needs answering.
If any of this resonates, let’s run a diagnostic on your marketing engine to see how it can run at its full potential.
