Marketing Simplified: The Four Main Parts of an Effective Marketing System

The purpose of your marketing is to generate qualified leads.

But there’s a lot more to building an effective marketing system than a one-sentence objective may indicate. There are a multitude of different opportunities, strategies, concepts, and tactics that you can leverage.

As an analogy, consider the game of football.

The object of the game is simple – score more points than your opponent. But within a football team are many different players, playing positions with different purposes that serve the overall goal.

Every football team has an offense, designed to score points; and a defense, designed to keep the opponent from scoring. But even within each unit, there are many different smaller groups with different objectives.

On offense, it starts with the linemen. Their job is to physically hold the defense back, creating time and space for the quarterback. The quarterback must take the ball, scan the field, and throw a pass to a receiver. Those receivers must be fast, strong, and able to run away from the defense. At any given time, there are 11 teammates on the field, all very different from each other, with vastly different skills, each with different assignments, all working towards the same objective.

When it all works together, it’s fun to watch. But if any one person on the team fails to do their job properly, the team is compromised and the objective might be lost.

Your marketing is the same. There four main components, all serving the common goal of generating qualified leads, but in very different ways. If any one of them is underperforming, it’s hurting your business.

The four main parts are Branding, Referral Generation, Client Retention, and Cold Lead Generation. Below is a brief overview of each of them. 

Branding

Branding is a concept that confuses many business owners. So here’s a simple working definition for you: Your brand is how your business is perceived by the outside world. Branding is the process of shaping that perception.

It’s defining “who you are” for the rest of the world to see and understand. Done right, it lays the foundation for your entire business. Branding includes visual elements like your logo and your color scheme, but it also includes your story, your unique selling proposition, your market positioning, your pricing strategy, and more. It’s your identity.

An effective brand positions your business as unique, memorable, and highly valuable. A strong brand attracts your target clients and customers magnetically to your business.

Referral Generation

Many business owners don’t take referral generation seriously – or at least, they don’t consider it a function of marketing. Instead they see referrals as something that happens organically as a result of providing good quality service.

It’s true that referrals can happen organically, but there is a whole lot you can do as a business owner to drive referrals. It takes intentional thought and strategy, but it’s worth it. At Spotlight Branding, most of our initial growth came through referrals from satisfied clients. As we grew into a seven-figure business, we’ve invested resources into many other forms of marketing, but referrals still play a key role in our growth.

As we dive into referral generation, I’ll share the strategies and techniques we have used to drive referrals – rather than just sitting back and hoping they happen.

Client Retention

Why are we talking about client retention in an article about marketing?

Because nothing is more difficult and more expensive than creating new clients and customers for your business. It takes significant time, effort, and resources to win new business.

It’s much easier and much more affordable to continue to win business from your existing clients and customers. Depending on your business model, that may involve moving your clients into monthly continuity programs. It might be selling your products to the same customers repeatedly.

Regardless of your business model, the reality is that it’s much harder and more expensive to win new clients, than it is to repeatedly engage clients that you’ve already won. And there’s a whole lot that you can do, from a marketing perspective, to keep your clients happy, engaged, and coming back again and again.

One of the most consequential breakthroughs that we had at Spotlight Branding was transitioning away from “one-off” services like website design, and instead creating continuity programs which included website creation, but was packaged with other continuous marketing services. Rather than getting paid once by a client, we are now paid each month on an ongoing basis. That’s a big deal.

Cold Lead Generation

Cold lead generation refers to creating new leads, from scratch, in the marketplace. This is where many business owners want to start with their marketing, but I consider it the fourth and final part of an effective marketing strategy for a reason.

Cold lead gen includes a wide variety of channels – pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization, billboards, direct mail, commercials on TV, and much more. It’s a simple concept: you use some sort of media to generate leads, and when you figure out a formula that creates leads at an acceptable cost, you can ramp up your spend and grow rapidly.

But, figuring out viable lead-gen strategies usually requires a significant investment and significant amount of trial-and-error. It’s expensive and it can be risky. For that reason, until you’ve optimized the first three parts of your marketing system, I don’t recommend spending much money generating new cold leads.

However, once you’ve dialed in your brand, your referral strategy, your retention strategy, and you have the financial resources to invest… cold lead generation is like pouring fuel on the fire. It’s how you scale your business – fast.

Want to know more? Click here to sign-up for our exclusive Weekly Marketing Hotsheet. It’s packed with tips and ideas to help you generate more referrals and take your marketing to the next level.

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Danny Decker

I work with business owners to create real, practical marketing plans – and create systems to make sure the plan actually gets executed. I’ll help you put a strategy in place to create predictably positive cash-flow, to generate new leads consistently, to create more referrals and word-of-mouth marketing, and much more.

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