In order to have alignment between your marketing department, your company brand, and your customers, you will need to establish a strong workflow between marketing and all the other departments of your organization. Individual team performance can be heavily affected by how and when other departments request or expect to have their projects done. You need to have a carefully thought out process that honors the needs of all departments but provides the lead time and quick response time that is necessary for so many marketing efforts.

Digital marketing has brought with it a lot of “noise,” making it difficult for brands to get their message out amidst all of the other marketing going on. This makes it even more important to figure out who your ideal customer is, what your message is, who needs to hear your message most, and how to communicate that message to engage your ideal customer and keep them interested.

Above all, know your customer. You need to start at the top by carefully exploring and understanding your analytics and the core data to do this part right. Interview your customers and put resources to work reading, listening, and participating in social media conversations. That way, you will clearly understand who your customers are, their pain points, their needs and concerns, and things that excite them.

From there, you can align your goals with the goals of your ideal customers. Learn your customer’s language and create your marketing content to “speak their unique language.” If you can decode that language and the meaning behind the words, phrases, and expressions they use, you can communicate uniquely with your customer base, helping to make you stand out. Constant review and tweaking of your content will need to be part of your process improvement cycle.

I talked about aligning goals earlier, but alignment goes deeper than being truly effective. In a perfect marketing world, you might be lucky enough to have a customer insights team, but they may work in their own little corner and not be aligned with other crucial teams. Look to develop a customer insights team that is fully integrated with your marketing and products teams as well as any other teams that touch customer technology because some customers need a really robust understanding of the brand and the product offerings and solutions being offered before they convert and the only way to accomplish that is to have a team that understands the ideal customer’s entire journey-a team that has insight into all of the customer’s curiosities, needs and wants
Consistency of your brand throughout all teams is important. You need to speak with a singular voice across all channels and business units, so your message is communicated clearly and consistently.

Identify a dedicated team that can focus solely on creating and archiving content, so you have a deep library of content to utilize. This team should be the creative engine of your organization and cover all types of content, including written, digital, video, aural, and any other types of content relevant to your brand and message. They should also focus on all of the different platforms your content needs to be optimized for so your customers always receive the highest quality content on every platform.

Finally, you need to identify 2-4 metrics or benchmarks against which to measure your performance both individually and collectively. Metrics are good in that they help you understand how you are performing. It gives you essential data you can use in your continual improvement processes.

Focusing on the basics will help you continually be in a position to improve your marketing efforts in this increasingly competitive market and improve your brand’s agility.