Marketing Strategy: Making Evangelists Out of Your Stakeholders
Who holds the keys to the kingdom in your marketing world? In a dental office, it’s often the dentist/owner. In a doctor’s office, it can be a small board of directors or a group of doctors. Corporations have CEOs, CFOs, and a board. These people can be zealous about the products or services your business provides but they often miss the value of your marketing efforts. Marketing is sometimes seen as a necessary evil or even simply overhead. How do you get them to not only be on board with your marketing efforts but encourage them to be your strongest allies? How do you inspire them with your marketing chutzpah and convert them into bonafide marketing evangelists?
Include Stakeholders in Marketing Strategy
Let them in on the secret. Tell them the story of your customer journey. Better yet, let them experience your customer journey for themselves. Every company has a marketing story. Invite them to see the first page and see if they’ll turn to the next.
Engage your stakeholders to pretend that they’ve never heard of your company before. Then, give them a pain point. “Mr. Joe Stakeholder, you are a patient who’s new in town and needs to find a good family doctor.” Because you’re fabulous at medical practice marketing, you know that the inbound techniques you’ve used combined with some solid traditional marketing will lead their Google keyword search straight to your website. Once there, you can astound them with how well you understand your buyer personas. They’ll be amazed when they receive your finely crafted follow up emails and absolutely delighted when you offer them a coupon to try out your services a few days later.
W.O.W. Your Stakeholders
After you’ve shown them the fabulous customer experience you’ve created, there are three keys to getting your company stakeholders to sing the praises of your marketing team and its efforts. You need to W.O.W. them.
- Workflows. You’ve thought out the entire customer journey from the time that they have never heard of you all the way through when they start singing your praises and telling their friends about you. Review, revise, and refine your workflows so that no one is ever left in the cold dark world of the Forgotten Prospect. Ensure that you continue to engage them for weeks, months, or even years until they complete their customer experience.
- Ownership. Understand the cost of customer acquisition, retention and, sadly, loss. Know what it takes to get a customer and keep them. Know the product or service you’re marketing inside and out. And then market it like you own it. (If you DO own it, then this part should be REALLY easy for you!)
- What’s next? The ride never stops. After you’ve honed your processes and you know everything about everything, don’t rest on your laurels. In today’s world, marketing is always changing. There is always the Next Big Thing around the corner. Make sure you have your finger on the pulse of today while you’re peering around the corner at tomorrow.
Let your stakeholders in on the secret of W.O.W. and they will understand not only that you have a plan but that it is a well-organized, detailed, thoughtful, and visionary plan.
So what? You have an awesome product or service and you can market the socks off of it, we know. But you need to have all the passengers on the train in order for the destination to mean something. Let your stakeholders in on your marketing secrets so you can all share the joy of the journey.
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