Your target market is unclear, overly broad, or inconsistent. It feels like you’re trying to be everything for everyone.
Marketing Landmark:
Aligned Purpose
Get clear on who you are as an organization, what sets you apart, and how marketing fits into larger business goals.
Signs You're In the Right Place
You’re not clear on your niche or what differentiates your core offering from competitors.
Marketing and sales rarely communicate, collaborate, or work together toward a shared goal.
The vision for the direction your business needs to grow in is unclear. Long-term business goals vary depending on who you ask.
Leadership struggles to be realistic when assessing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Marketing and executive leaders often disagree on the budget and resources marketing will need to achieve expected outcomes.
Why You Need Aligned Purpose to Move Your Marketing Forward
The core purpose of marketing is to communicate the value a business can provide to its customers. To be effective in accomplishing this, it’s crucial for marketing to be aligned with the the overall business mission and DNA. You need to be 100% clear on who you are as a business – what sets you apart, what you value, and who you want to become.
Of course, marketing can’t make these important business decisions on its own; genuine alignment starts at the very top. But if you’re leading marketing and you aren’t able to answer these fundamental questions, it’ll be impossible to create a consistent brand identity that can be felt in every interaction, communication, and piece of content that goes out.
The 3 Key Steps to Reaching Aligned Purpose
Who you are
To ensure a consistent, memorable customer experience, marketing needs to be aligned with executive leadership, sales, and operations.
Instead of trying to be everything for everyone, get clear on who you are as a business and who you’re trying to reach.
What sets you apart
Your business differentiators – what you do best and what sets you apart – are the reason your customers choose your business over your competitors’. Make sure marketing, sales, and operations leaders are on the same page about what makes the business unique so the value you’re promising customers is the same value they actually get.
What success looks like
The fundamental goal of marketing is to support overall business goals – if the goals or long-term vision for the business are unclear or inconsistent, marketing will never be able to lay a solid foundation.
Make sure your marketing team is clear on the long-term goals of the business, and the role marketing plays in achieving them.
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Resources
Vivid Vision
Key: Who you are
Vivid Vision is a method that helps companies bring their ideas together to generate a clear plan for what their future looks like. It’s a great resource to help you align and inspire your employees, customers, and suppliers around your vision.
Want a truly unique selling proposition? Be remarkable.
Key: What sets you apart
The key to developing a killer USP — one you’ll never have doubts about and the competition won’t be able to touch — is actually fairly simple: be remarkable.
Created by:
Are you a data bully?
Key: What success looks like
Bullying the data until it paints a more flattering picture of your business will never get you to the truth about what’s working – and what’s not.
Are you a data bully?
Key: What success looks like
Bullying the data until it paints a more flattering picture of your business will never get you to the truth about what’s working – and what’s not.
6 Landmarks on the Journey to Full-Potential Marketing
Prefer Guided Help?
Created by:
Do I Know My Ideal Clients?
Key: Understand your customer
This handy workbook from guide from our friends at Convergo guides you through the process of defining exactly who your ideal customer is, what matters to them, and what they look for from you.
