You Have an Opportunity to Refine Your Marketing Approach

Bryce Raley
By: Bryce Raley
Reading Time: 5 minutes

2020 forced many small businesses to become focused in ways they didn’t imagine. I’m not gonna go into the obvious details that we’ve all lived through recently. You’re very well aware of them every day. At The Marketing Squad, we refined our approach during that time, and I’ll share how in this post. Hopefully you’ll be inspired to take actions that help you refine your marketing approach and position you well, no matter the business season you're in.

Managing Your Website Hub and Online Presence

Your website is your online home. You own it, unlike social media profiles. It's your publishing platform that can present who you are and how to get what you offer as well as feed content to your other channels like email and social media.

We started our refinement process by reflecting on how our website reaches our target audience, provides resources to a larger circle beyond our target, and fulfills our operational needs.

We took time as an agency to walk through our website with a story mindset – identifying the key internal and external stories we were looking to tell and determining which prospects and clients fit the model of our character.

With this character in mind, we assessed their problems and pains and thought through what success looks like for them. We also thought about their motivation to avoid failure.

This process led us to a redesign of our website. We’ve approved the internal mockups and are excited to begin development soon! We can’t wait to see how the new user flow and look resonates with new and existing clients.

what does my website need

Telling Your Compelling Story

One of the end results of this introspection was a Brand Guide – or Brand Bible, if you will. It’s a document we put together that uniquely describes our brand and how we engage as a brand. We’ve been building these for years for our clients, but this is the first time we’ve ironed out these details for ourselves to this kind of degree. 

Our Brand Guide will inform our Marketing Strategy and the many tactical types of content we’ll produce in coming months and years. 

We’ve also taken major steps to use more video in our marketing in 2020. It was already a strong trend heading into the year but became even more paramount in the virtual landscape of Covid-19. 

Both our use of video internally and with our partner and project clients has exploded in 2020. We’ve found very creative ways to capture video, and thus stories, during the lockdowns and limited capacity here in Louisville, KY. 

If you have a great story to tell, then follow a process that allows you to tell it in a genuine way – consistently – that helps your clients solve their problems. If you don’t know your unique story, then I encourage you to spend some time right now to craft it. This isn’t the time for “me too” businesses to thrive.

tell your story

Implementing Inbound Marketing Methodologies 

Educating, entertaining, and persuading your audience with relevant content, proper calls to action, and personalized marketing automation has always been a core philosophy of The Squad. We have a long history as a Hubspot Partner agency and have embraced their Marketing Funnel mindset – which is now the Flywheel!

In order to fully sync our sales, marketing, and service efforts across the agency, we went all-in with Hubspot's software in early 2020. We never walked away from Hubspot since becoming a Partner nearly a decade ago, but we always had a mixed bag of tools for doing the job.

We made the collective decision as an agency to go all-in with Hubspot once again. We have implemented the Sales and Marketing tools and are looking at the jump to Service hub next. 

Now that our team is immersed back into inbound marketing training and tactics to serve our clients, we’re feeling that same focus and energy we had years ago. It allows us to simplify while also dig deeper. We are still leaning on digital ad strategies but more as a supplement rather than a leading tactic for reaching our goals.

We are currently building out content roadmaps, segmenting email lists, and organizing new campaigns for new product and service offerings we’ve developed during Covid. It’s been energizing for us.

Enabling Your Sales Team 

Moving our CRM to the Hubspot Sales tool has been a game-changer. Our entire team has that single source of truth that many organizations desire. Our data isn’t perfect yet, nor will it ever likely be, but we have processes that help feed project management, onboarding, accounting, and data analytics. We can easily manage our pipeline, project closes, and estimate revenue. 

We’ve also created really nice dashboards that play well with the Scorecard mentality we use in EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System, which has been our go-to operating system for the past few years). 

Marshall Fall, our VP of Business Development says this is the best CRM he’s used in his 25-year sales career.

Our CRM is also gonna help us as we push an inside sales culture here at The Squad. It will help us track who has purchased which services from us and allows us to organize new products or services to meet other needs of our client base. 

We’re really excited about several new services we’ve developed during 2020 in response to changes in the marketplace. That's so important right now as an overall business strategy. More to come on about this in future blogs and emails!

The last frontier for our agency within the Hubspot software will be the Service Hub. We’re excited to dig in and see how it can help us up our game across the board with our customer service. 

If you are considering how to refine your marketing approach, brand strategy, or just shopping for the right tools, we’d love to help guide you through that process. It’s what we’ve always done for clients. Now that we drank our own kool aid these past several months of refocusing on the tools and tactics we really believe in, we can empathize even more with the challenges you’ll face. 

If you're interested, let's schedule a quick call or coffee appointment so we can discuss how to help solve your current marketing challenges.

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