Bigger picture marketing

Taking a strategic approach across all marketing touchpoints is a sure way to get the best return on investment. Jane Ward, co-founder and director of Team 4 Marketing, explains.

Whether it’s the mediums of web, digital and social media, or traditional advertising and PR, there have never been so many ways to sell to your customers. And there’s never been so much competition for their attention.

Whatever part of the fenestration supply chain you operate in, one thing is clear: the market is crowded.

You can’t change this, but you can think differently to make sure you stand out. It’s what we call competitive positioning, and you can use your marketing to showcase it. If you take the way the big consumer brands market themselves as an example – whether it’s a TV ad, a social media post, or their website content – you instantly know who they are and what they offer. They have strong personalities that speak clearly and confidently to their target markets. Whenever and wherever you see a familiar brand, you bring preconceived ideas of who they are and what they stand for. In other words, the job of selling to you is already half-done.

It’s something every business can – and should – do, even if your budget is a fraction of those big names.

The first step to achieving this is to get your messaging right. The messages, content and tone you deliver needs to carry across all your marketing, clearly and consistently.

It’s important too to think about your products and your target customers so you can get the positioning right. If you supply high-end products to high end-customers, all your marketing needs to ooze quality. If you’re offering value for money to the mass market, your marketing needs to reflect this.

But the importance of consistency of messaging doesn’t stop there. It’s also vital to embrace the fact we all live and operate in a multi-channel world, and the rise of digital marketing opportunities is exponential. It gives you a wealth of opportunities to target your customers and get your message across.

Having said that, you don’t need to have a presence on every marketing channel. Far from it: you only need to focus on the platforms that your customers are looking at and engaging with to amplify your reach. But you do need to make sure that you think across all your marketing channels at the start and never in isolation.

For example, if you’re running a social media campaign asking customers to submit photos of a recent installation, make sure it’s mentioned on your website, and that you use it as a PR opportunity too. Or let’s say you wrote a ‘five top tips’ blog for your website. Could you repurpose that for a print magazine? At the very least, you’ve got five social media posts, each pushing people towards your website. In each case, you’re reinforcing your message, promoting your brand, and maximising your investment.

This intelligent, strategic approach to marketing is what we do best at Team 4 Marketing. We founded the company in 2004 after successful corporate marketing careers in the industry. We’ve worked with several of the industry’s biggest names since then, and many of the clients we started with in 2004 are still with us today. More importantly, we have helped them grow and develop into some of the leading industry brands today.

We have achieved this by purposely developing their brand messaging and pushing relevant content across all marketing platforms. We continually plan, promote and review all activity to ensure we are aligning any business to the latest trends. And as specialists in the fenestration, construction and manufacturing markets, we have an influential network that allows us to position our clients in leading trade press publications, events and digital platforms.

Above all, we really get to know our clients and take time to discover what makes them stand out so we can deliver powerful marketing campaigns that deliver tangible results. In an industry where businesses and brands are vying for our attention 24/7, it is still possible to make an impact and stand out by making your marketing work harder for you. And that’s where Team 4 Marketing can help.