The new year is almost upon us. Maybe you’re a graphic designer starting fresh, or perhaps you’re an entrepreneur that needs some strategic marketing tips. No matter your title, it’s vital to know the science that makes marketing work! Thus, like a chemist in their lab, today we’ll be focusing on five practical and effective methods that will help you achieve your specific goals. These strategic methods and formulas have been compiled based on what will help you right now while guaranteeing success for any venture. So be sure to pay attention, take notes, and bookmark this page for reference because I want to give you the five types of strategic marketing methods that will bring you and your clients to the top!
What Is Strategic Marketing?
Marketing is alive. There is a process and a way that things come together to become an actual reality and have success instead of just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping that they stick. So in this video article, I want to teach you to have the most success in your marketing campaigns by developing a proven process. These are scientific methods I’ve learned over the last 15 years from some of the best mentors in marketing in the world. I’m going to share more about those with you in later articles. But first, I’m going to talk about what each of the methods is so you can start to get your head wrapped around them, and I can give you some context of what we’re going to be talking about when it comes to the science behind successful marketing.
Marketing is more science than it is art. Of course, there is an artistic element incorporated into marketing, but it’s science first, and since 2005 I’ve been absolutely obsessed with marketing and what works and what doesn’t work. I’ve tried everything under the sun pretty much at this point. I’ve made a lot of videos on it, and I’m writing a book about marketing. I live and breathe marketing; I live and breathe brands, and marketing is the way that you build a brand. So, my mentor told me some of the best advice he’d ever given me in my entire life. There’s a backstory here that I’d like to tell you about, which began in about 2010.
My Strategic Marketing Awakening
I went into the office where this mentor of mine was working; it was a client of mine for whom I worked about four or five hours a week. I was working about 15 hours a week for this company as a consultant at the time doing marketing. I was doing SEO and pay-per-click and all that fun stuff. One day, I walked into the office after I had just designed a beautiful tri-fold brochure for a mattress company, and I walked up to the mentor to whom I referred earlier. I handed it to him, and he said, “Wow, this is really nice, but what’s the point?”
I looked at him and was perplexed. “Uh, what do you mean, ‘what’s the point’?” I thought, How does he not understand this? He’s not a stupid guy. What does he not get? But of course, the point is to make people buy mattresses, and I told him this.
He looked up at me and asked, “Where in this brochure does it say to buy a mattress?” My heart sank, and I realized he was right. There was nowhere in that brochure that actually mentioned buying a mattress. Although I knew the tactics and how to do marketing from the tactical side, and even from the design side, and positioning things to look beautiful…I did not have any understanding of the root of marketing, which lies in behavioral science.
Why Strategic Marketing Is Important
Strategic marketing harnesses the science of marketing that is foundational to what drives people to take action, what creates that connection, and why they buy. I had almost no foundation for that. I knew people, but I wasn’t really good with them. I listened, but I didn’t have a strategic foundation or a method that I could apply to my business when it came to designing these marketing materials. A “big aha moment” is what I had at that moment in 2010. I realized that I had made a big mistake and missed the objective. All I had done was create a beautifully designed promotional branding piece, but I didn’t have a design or brochure that was actually going to drive a massive amount of sales. That’s what the mattress business needed because they were a new business.
So I was actually doing them an injustice by not understanding the foundational elements of having a marketing strategy, not just a beautifully designed marketing campaign. And so there is a revenue potential here if you do this thing right to make millions and millions of dollars from marketing campaigns that are structured and formatted around the science of marketing. If you can apply these things today, and you can learn and apply what I’m going to show you, this is going to help you increase your skills and increase your pricing as a designer. And that’s ultimately my goal. I want to give you more success, and in turn, it’s going to make your clients more successful, too.
Why Am I Sharing This?
It’s going to impact communities, it’s going to influence cities, it’s going to impact towns, and hopefully, it’s going to impact the world. That’s what I’m all about: changing and improving the world. So as you can probably tell already just by the introduction, we’re going to be giving away some massive information over the coming weeks; we’ve already been giving away some massive information, and our journey has been incredible. I’m going to be delivering so much value in this article specifically and expanding on it over the coming weeks.
5 Strategic Marketing Methods
Let’s get down to it. So in the last 15 years, all of this knowledge I’ve accumulated about marketing strategy through the mentorships, coaches, courses, training programs, partnerships, and mastermind groups has helped me develop and refine five marketing methods that I utilize for my clients. This strategy is a foolproof plan, and these are the methods I personally use both for and within my business. Using these five techniques, you can almost guarantee the effectiveness of your campaigns. Of course, you don’t have to utilize all of them, but use the ones that work best for you and those that you enjoy most.
However, I’m going to share these five approaches in future installments. This article is a simple overview before getting into specifics about each of them in future dedicated articles so you may learn more about how to use them. Meanwhile, do some research on your own. Get a head start by researching things on your own before the new articles are published, or just take notes and fill in the blanks when you read those in-depth guides. Let’s get started with the five marketing strategies, as well as the science of marketing.
A.I.D.A.
So strategic marketing method number one is the A.I.D.A. model. This strategy is probably the most common, the most powerful, the most well-known of the five. Awareness, interest, desire, and action; that’s what that stands for. I am going to do a whole article on it another time. Still, the A.I.D.A. method is a proven scientific method and process that you can follow when it comes to creating these marketing campaigns. A.I.D.A. is a technique that every single business should have done and should be doing regularly. You need to be teaching this method to your clients. It’s a process you need to be taking your clients through. If you’re not doing this, you’re only shortchanging them, and you’re not going to be able to get paid the money you deserve for the talent you’re bringing to the table, so you must learn that method.Â
S.W.O.T.
The second strategic marketing method that I’ve refined and made my own is the S.W.O.T. analysis. The SWOT analysis has also been around for a long time. It’s very popular and stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. There are some grids that you can use online. The goal of this article is just to kind of give you a heads up on what these are called and put them on your radar. As future articles start to drop on these specific topics, I’m going to really dive in and give you the depth of knowledge that you really need to apply these things to your business so that it would be helpful for you.
4 Ps of Strategic Marketing
Strategic marketing method number three is called the Four Ps of Marketing. This one is also popular. They’ve been around for a long time, and I can’t wait to dive into them with you. The Four Ps are place, process, price, and product. I want to make sure you understand that method because it’s an important method. Without going too deep into it, it’s something that I’ve been using for years. It also has some iterations on top of that but this is another scientific method that you can apply to your marketing strategies. Basically, you should wrap everything you’re doing around these Four Ps.
7 Spokes of Strategic Marketing
So this strategic marketing method ties into the previous one, the Four Ps, but this one is the Seven Spokes of marketing. Essentially, this is the expanded version. It’s a great way to catalog and assess your marketing efforts. Now, this is another scientific method that you can apply to your business. This will help you develop data-driven strategies for the future. I don’t want to go too deep into it yet, but I want to name it so you can research it on your own.
EPL Method
The final strategic marketing approach is a big one. I get to take credit for this because it was through mentoring and with some other coaches that I developed it into my own method, but I call it the EPL method. I’m not going to tell you what that stands for because there’ll be a really great post about it later.
If you know what I’m talking about, it goes back to Aristotle and other philosophers; those guys developed these strategies, and I’m bringing them into the new age of digital marketing. I’m going to teach you my EPL method. It’s one of the scientific methods that I’ve been using in my business, and it is the one that has served me best. It’s really given me kind of that edge against all my competitors because nobody else is using this process. My mentor is the one that shared this strategy with me, and I made it even better.
How Does Strategic Marketing Help Designers?
It can be hard to differentiate between marketing and branding from a design perspective because they’re related but not the same. You have to have a marketing plan and an objective if you’re creating anything from a logo, a brand, a website, funnels, landing pages, brochures, yard signs, regardless of whether it’s motion graphics videos or whatever else. What is the goal of the majority of businesses? It’s not about branding; it’s about sales.
Branding is secondary. Branding is something that you do up-front to make sure you have a clear, concise brand. But in terms of marketing your business on a regular basis, you’re not just putting your logo out there; you need to share specific messages with some sort of call to action and get specific outcomes. The outcome for you should be an ROI, and the way to guarantee that is by applying one of these methods now.
Final Thoughts
It’s really, really important to me that I give you the context of this article. The thing that really bugs me, and it gets under my skin, is when people miss the mark 9 out of 10 times or maybe even 99 out of 100 times. They make these great website designs, landing pages, brochures, or flyers, and there’s no point to them. It may look nice, but it doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t drive me to take any kind of action. It doesn’t connect with me. It just goes right in the trash.
I see this constantly on sites that don’t perform. People blame the designer, or they blame the product. They focus on all the other things when the marketing piece is the problem. It failed to move people to take action. That is the goal of a good marketing piece: connecting to who you are and to who they are and making those core values stick to each other. That’s an important piece of what I wanted to share with you, but the science of marketing is key. It’s what separates me. It’s what can separate you. And I want you to take some action on that, so stay tuned for more articles. Until then, I’ll see you in the Instagraphics Pro Group. Thank you guys so much for reading. I’m Adrian Boysel and as always, keep looking up.