Great marketing is like a house. It must be built from the ground up. This book is your step-by-step guide to creating your marketing dream home.
Think of the Undefeated Marketing System like a course of antibiotics. You can’t stop halfway through, even if you think you’re healed. If you want your business to thrive, you have to see the method through all the way to the end. You can’t chase shiny objects or lose faith partway through.
The 5 Steps of the Undefeated Marketing System
Step 1: Take a Deep Dive into Your Target Market Customer/Client Data (3 to 4 Weeks)
Every successful marketing campaign is built on a firm understanding of who your customer is, what motivates them, and what they value.
For example, if you’re a food product company, you need to know whether your customer base is mostly moms or bachelors. Are they looking for organic food or quick, convenient food? Or somewhere in the middle? Are they more likely to buy in bulk? How much time do they spend online, and are they LinkedIn addicts or Pinterest lovers?
In other words, you need to know who your customer is—and what they value—before you even consider spending your marketing dollars on a bunch of unproven tactics. And there is only one way that a company can truly get to know their customers: by taking a deep dive into customer data.
Step 2: Build Your Data-Backed Strategic Marketing Plan (2 Weeks)
Marketing seems to change quicker than you can finish this sentence.
The speed of that change makes it easy to get lost in a sea of tactics. One day, Instagram is the go-to platform, and the next day, the news is filled with mentions of TikTok.
These are the wrong questions to ask. It all depends on what motivates your customers and where they put their eyeballs. Your best bet is to be screen agnostic.
Some people respond to social media advertising, while others gravitate toward television ads or even direct mail. Your marketing goal shouldn’t be to use as many tactics as possible to reach as many people as possible. It should be to use the right tactics to reach the right people in the right way they want to receive them.
If you’ve followed through on Step 1, you’ll already know whether your target customer/client responds better to direct mail, radio, video content, in-app advertising, and so on. You’ll know which platforms they use and how they spend their time online.
Step 3: Create Your Data-Backed Messaging and Creative Brand (or Rebrand) (2 to 4 Weeks)
If you live in Florida and want to get to New York, would you book a flight that takes off from Washington, DC?
Of course not. Starting a journey in the middle is pointless. At worst, you’ll never get where you’re going, and at best, it will open you up to all kinds of headaches.
Unfortunately, corporate marketing agencies are incentivized to create advertisements around their client’s brand before considering what motivates their customers or where there is alignment between the 2.
That would never fly in a political campaign. Can you imagine building a series of campaign marketing ads without knowing what voters cared about? A fancy video on your website isn’t going to get you very far if your candidate can’t connect with constituents.
When marketing agencies do this, they’re thinking about a brand, not a business. And unfortunately, that’s also when they hit serious roadblocks.
If you don’t base your branding on customer insights data, you risk alienating your audience. Or worse, pissing them off. Content creation and branding should never happen until you’ve got a firm grip on who your customers are, what they want, how you’re going to reach them, and how that aligns with your outcome and vision.
Every bit of creative content that we created for our pest control client was based on what we found in the Customer Insights Report. Every. Single. Bit.
Step 4: Test Your Data-Backed Messaging to Prove What Will Work (4 to 6 Weeks)
You now know your customer inside and out. You have a game plan. You have a brand that you know will work when the customer is ready to shop. It’s go time, right?
Wrong.
There’s one more step you have to follow before you’re ready to launch your new, low-risk marketing campaign: message and ad testing.
A lot of marketing agencies run high-cost tests and hope for the best. They spend a huge chunk of the budget on ads that may not work, without considering the client’s needs. From the marketing agency’s perspective, if it doesn’t work out, they always have more creative ideas waiting in the wings, and they know that many business owners will just keep footing the bill.
Political marketers know better. Testing is a tried-and-true part of our playbook. Before launching a full marketing campaign, political marketers typically test dozens of slightly different ads to see which ones get traction.
It’s a genius move because it allows you to see which messages will most effectively advance your customers to conversion—and to do it at a very low cost. You’re able to constantly evaluate your ROI at scale, without wasting a lot of money on messages that don’t work. In other words, the first 3 steps give you the cream of the crop, and Step 4 helps you find the most perfect drop of cream imaginable.
Step 5: Launch Your Data-Based Marketing Campaign (Ongoing)
Once you’ve come back with some conclusive “wins” from the testing phase, you are ready to finally launch the full marketing campaign. By now, your marketing efforts will be laser-focused, and you’ll be using only the highest-ROI messages and content.
You’re primed to win.
Still, your launch isn’t a 1-time event. You’ll need to constantly evaluate your results and customer data, and periodically revisit the other steps to see if you can improve and optimize your ROI.
But here’s the good news. Because you’ve got the other 4 steps under your belt, ongoing adaptation will be much easier. You won’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you want to improve your message.
If you start applying these 5 steps—not just to your marketing, but to your life in general—you will have a monster edge. Don’t leave stones unturned, and stop leaving money on the table. Rely on the data if you want to be undefeated.