1. Swag and collateral.

Everyone loves to wear the thing they’re proud of. It is apparent how companies spend endless amounts on branded apparel and swag. People are always wanting to get involved, especially when it involves t-shirts. Swag naturally markets your business with your brand on apparel. Consider investing in your collateral too. It is all in the details, no matter what it is. Even something as simple as business cards, they are worth giving out if they make a positive impression. It is a low expense with high gain.

2. Don’t build a staff, build a team.

The more you take an active interest in your employees, the more interested in the company they become. People advocate for what they believe in and feel a part of. When your team feels like they are a part of something big, they won’t be afraid to market your business. Keep in mind that words make worlds, so consider shifting the culture toward a team-mentality.

3. Set small weekly goals.

Create goals the team can get behind and reward them with fun. This shows the organization has realistic goals and everyone benefits from working hard. When the team can see the set an attainable goal that they want to get behind, it helps them feel like they’re a team. Remember that everyone benefits when you’re working hard.

4. Involve your team in creating assets.

When the team sees that they are a part of something, they naturally want to share it. Involve the teammates that helped create assignments by giving them a shoutout or including them in the publishing details. Impact occurs when you involve your team in the creation of assets and processes.

5. Involve your team in your social media calendar.

Be on the front end and let the team know when something is coming out so they have a heads up to help build the business. It is a gentle way to encourage engagement with the company content, whether it’s a like, share, or comment.

6. Radiate positivity.

If the office culture is a positive one, the team is more likely to promote the brand.
Intentionality creates positivity! Instilling hope in the team helps solidify how their work matters. Make it your goal to radiate positivity, to the point where the team instills it before leadership has the chance to.

7. Celebrate client success stories.

Most of the team do not know the revenue of the company, so their interest lies in how they are making a difference. People seek to celebrate a positive impact they were a part of. Communicate the small and large success stories to inspire the team to share.

At the end of the day, you need your team to have the desire to market your business. If they don’t, take a deep internal look and consider these tips to inspire your team. Remember that it is all about creating excitement and building a family atmosphere to enable motivation to share your business.

If you’re a business owner or marketing director, we want to invite you to fill out a Brand Assessment at https://greenfox.io/brand-assessment/ It is a great opportunity to evaluate where your brand stands and how effective it can be marketed by your team.

Advocate for Excellence within your Organization

It is not just managing the products that we’re selling or the companies that we’re working for, but actually advocating for them. Whenever you can be an advocate for what these companies are doing or what your company is doing then the product will sell. Advocate for excellence within your organization. We can’t stress enough how important it is to you, as the marketing director, to go around to your team and analyze. If you see holes, uniquely bring those up and get them fixed. Be proud of your product and be an advocate.

Determine who your Customers are and Focus

Determine who your customers are in focus marketing. Understanding your customers and how they make decisions is impeccable. Around here we use personas, a way we perceive our customers to make purchasing decisions. Laying all of the details out helps us identify who we’re going after to really know the audience that we want to target. Identify personas and who your target audience is and you’ll always see a better return using data. Let’s get practical. Take a step and try to identify some personas for your own company.

Learn the Voice and Tone of your Organization

Learn the voice and tone of your organization. Develop the voice of the product or the service of your selling. It is very different than how you as an individual would speak as yourself. Let me give one of the best examples I’ve ever seen. A guy that really gets it is currently the CEO of Justin Brands. Justin Brands consist of Justin Boots, Tony Llama, Nocona, and several other boot brands that you may know. I was going to meet with him for lunch and in my mind I envision a guy in jeans, boots and maybe a polo. Instead, he jumps out of his electric car wearing a suit; a complete businessman. He, however, speaks for the brand and speaks everything that the brand stands for. He gets it. His lifestyle may not link up to the brand, but his voice and tone does.

Be an Amazing Storyteller

I would suggest learning from the sales department of your organization. It is more likely they’re most versed in what you guys do. They have to talk to clients all day about it and try to sell products. The reason storytelling is so important is because marketing is storytelling. Sometimes you can make the most boring thing exciting. A great example recently occurred. One of our clients raises, trains, competes and sells bucking bulls. One of their cows, Lacey, gave birth to her first Red Laces bull. Unfortunately, the bull was stillborn. During birth, Lacey’s legs fell asleep inhibiting her ability to stand and cutting off circulation in her legs. The last two days they had been doing everything in their power to help Lacey, from IVs to cranes. We decided this would be a good behind-the-scenes story to tell people. Hundreds followed along in the story as they shared her progress. This was one of the most successful social media things we’ve ever done for them because we took a story and used its’ natural momentum. Being an amazing storyteller is telling a story about your organization whether you know it or not. You’re not just writing content about your business, you’re telling a story about what your business is.

Know your Strengths and Weaknesses

Lastly, focus on your strengths and weaknesses are by understanding what you’re good at and  find ways to outsource the things you’re not good at. In marketing we’ve seen that there’s half of people that are very creative and and the other half that are very structured (focused on management of a project. Typically there’s no one that is good at both. Know your strengths and admit where you’re weak so you can bring people around you who can help accomplish what needs to be done. If you’re the marketing director and you lean more towards creative with people who need you to be more technical, bring someone who can be your technical thinking on board or outsource. We can’t stress enough how it will change the game if you do.

So if you feel stressed, we want to give you words of encouragement. As long as your leadership knows you’ve got their back, and you’ve got the company’s back, then you will thrive. We know a lot of you are in the marketing director role because of how creative you are. Working with a lot of technical people is harder than you thought, but keep your head up and get some help if needed. As long as you’re an advocate of your company and product, you’ll be more than okay!

To hear the full version, head over to our podcast, click here.

Consistent Messaging

The first we’ll go through is not running campaigns that align all your marketing channels together. There’s a million different things that you don’t even recognize as marketing that you’re doing and you’ve got to put your best foot forward. If those things are coming from all these different sources, they’re going to have the potential to look different. When your branding starts looking different than what it’s supposed to, it can get confusing and people don’t recognize it. You become less memorable.

We use the Spine Analogy. If you’re using one company for your website, but then you go hire another company to do your videos or design your logo, those companies don’t always communicate to each other the right way. When you take everything in-house, you’re able to align everything that you’re doing in your branding on point every single time.

We recognize it’s expensive to hire a marketing company that will keep everything under one umbrella, but you’ve got to be intentional. So the point is, if you’re going to hire different companies to do different things, then you’ve got to be intentional about making sure that your branding is on point.

Putting Too Many Eggs in the Social Media Basket

Oftentimes, because we all know how to do social media, we go in and put a post on a page and say, I did my marketing for the day. If you’re a marketing director, you’ve probably been guilty of your boss coming in and saying, I need this to go on social media right now.

The problem is, busting through that crowded noise is really something that you have to work extra hard at. One of the best ways to do that is through photography and videography; making that the best it can possibly be. Everything that you post has to be intentional, and quality needs to matter. What are you doing to catch people’s attention? Don’t be the norm. Don’t be average. What are you doing to step up? I promise it matters. You will see a difference in your business no matter what your business is.

Social media would be very similar to if everyone could take a billboard. Everyone knows how to do social media, so if everyone knew how to put up their own billboard sign, just make it themselves, put it up right outside their business, the street would be flooded with awful ugly signs, and the ones that would stand out would be the ones who look great. Those would be the ones that stand out and say like, okay, those guys must know what they’re doing over there. So it’s very similar to that with social media and that care and attention really does matter.

Getting Wrapped up in the Metrics that Don’t Line Up to Your Success Goals

It’s all about metrics. Let’s say a company is killing it in SEO with just one keyword. The keywords they think are important, may not be important to the product or the service line that they’re trying to do. What we see often is the client coming in and saying, “I want to make sure that I’m beating this other company,” versus, “I want to sell more of the thing that I sell,” and those two are competing and you only have a certain amount of dollars, no matter the size of your budget. It really doesn’t matter. You have a certain amount of dollars that go toward each one of those keywords. The first thing kind of matters because of pride, and second thing that matters because the success of your business and sales.That’s a fine line that you really have to walk through and figure out what is the thing that actually matters.