By David Smith
CX
Content
Marketing
Like strategy before tactics, a foundation must be built before the structure. This idea is especially true for your marketing system.
We’ve all heard the quotes about the importance of the foundation; from business tycoon Richard Branson “The important thing is that you’ve got a strong foundation before you start to try to save the world or help other people,” to legendary performer David Allen Coe, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
There is little argument that when building, the foundation is crucial.
When you have a firm marketing foundation you can:
- Educate and inform your audience,
- Deliver content that addresses customers’ needs,
- Build your contact list,
- Establish basic campaigns to promote services and nurture prospects,
- Get your firm found in search.
How do you establish a solid marketing foundation for your technology consulting firm?
Several components are involved in building your marketing foundation.
Website
First, you need a business growth supporting website. You may have a website now but for it to be business supporting it has to connect with visitors with the right messages, provide content and deliver an experience aligned to the customer journey, suggests first or next steps using appropriate calls to actions, include list building tactics, and build trust and authority in your industry. It cannot be a digital brochure.
Your foundation should include Email marketing. This allows you to automate welcome and customer success email workflows, create nurture sequences that educate and engage prospects, and distribute your content to your audience, so it lets you measure their interest.
Content
Speaking of content; it is essential to your foundation. That includes well delivered on-page content, relevant articles in your blog, and authority building in-depth content that can be deployed as guide pages or in eBooks, white papers, and educational products. You’ll also need customer-generated content like testimonials and reviews to build trust and further strengthen your marketing foundation.
Social
Social media should also be included in your foundation. Your profiles should be consistently branded and include consistent messaging. Your social media activity should be aligned to a plan that reflects how you will use social media in general, but also how each social platform will support your business. For example, Instagram may be something reserved for team building, culture strengthening, and recruitment.
SEO
SEO and the resulting search engine results should also be included in your marketing foundation. Keyword and content analysis, on-page techniques, and external activities all support getting found in search. If your firm works in a particular industry area or has a product focus, take advantage of community registries and partner pages with high authority and can provide supporting content and backlinks to your site.
These core components work together to provide the basics of tech consulting marketing success, but they don’t happen by accident. The foundation must be unified by your marketing strategy.
Most consulting firms have the foundation elements in place but have missed the importance of the marketing strategy to bring those elements purpose. If your website has one message, your social profiles contradict the message, and your content is random or nonexistent you should not be surprised that you are not achieving marketing results.
What about strategy?
The marketing strategy identifies your core message, your ideal customer, the content you’ll need and the channels you’ll use. The strategy also integrates with developing your firms’ brand which goes beyond brand elements like you’re your logo, colors, and fonts, but also defines your value promise and position in the market.
The marketing strategy also includes the design of the customer experience that mirrors the customer buying process and how they achieve value from your services or products.
Define your strategy before your marketing foundation, or you’ll find yourself retrofitting various elements of the foundation.
A rock-solid marketing foundation is necessary to achieve marketing results. If the foundation is weak or incomplete, the marketing system built on top of it will be inadequate and not produce results.
Need help establishing your marketing foundation or want an assessment of your foundation’s strength? Let’s talk. Schedule a call with our team to discover how your firm can build a marketing system that gets results.
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About Valens Point
We help early-stage tech companies accelerate growth by building brand credibility, establishing repeatable lead generation, and supporting sales and partner teams. The result — effective marketing up and running in a fraction of the time it would take to recruit, hire, and train an internal marketing team.