✅ Your Marketing Checklist for Sustainable Growth
The strategic 17-step checklist to evaluate how marketing is helping you to achieve goals and sustainable growth.
Hi 👋 I’m Florian Schleicher. This is the FutureStrategies newsletter of FUTURES. Thank you so much for reading along 💚 If you want to learn strategic marketing from me, then my Simple & Sustainable Marketing Academy is the perfect fit for you.
”Am I on the right Marketing-path?”
That's a question I've heard in many conversations with Heads of Marketing and founders over the past few weeks.
And my first response to it is also a question:
"How can you tell you're on the right path?"
So here I have a special gift for you.
I share my marketing checklist with 17 points to answer the question of the right way to achieve goals and sustainable growth for yourself.
You can simply fill out the list yourself and in a few moments determine how success-oriented, sustainable, and strategically sound your marketing already is.
In today's post, I go into detail about the checklist structure, the importance of strategies, and 3 of the checklist items.
» Drop me a mail if you want the entire checklist «
To determine if and how our marketing is working, we first need one thing:
A marketing strategy.
😵 What is a strategy?
There is hardly a term that has so many different understandings and interpretations. For most, it is enough to say "I want growth" to call it a strategy. Others think that a list of goals is a strategy.
Therefore briefly a classification:
A strategy for successful marketing consists of
A precise diagnosis,
guidelines that provide direction, and
coherent actions that help us achieve what we set out to do.
A strategy is the formulation of the best (=most effective) path and direction to get from A to B. It takes a lot of good questions and answers. A communication or marketing strategy helps us set up marketing to successfully get our brand, products, and services into the minds and lives of our consumers.
I always find this illustration of Undercurrent very helpful in defining it:
Veteran strategist Richard Rumelt writes in his book, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy:
“A strategy is a design of action and policy that’s aimed at surmounting a high-stakes challenge. It’s a way of dealing with a problem.”
The goal is always quite simple from my point of view:
We want marketing to help us achieve goals AND sustainable growth.
The three points from the checklist that I want to explain to you here are:
I know what problem of my target audience I am solving.
I can pitch/narrate my business and products.
My marketing helps me to convert.
» Drop me a mail if you want the entire checklist «
🕵️ Let's start with the problem
A little shocker at the beginning: nobody cares about your business, your marketing, and your products.
Sounds dramatic, but what I mean by this is that people are primarily concerned with mastering their everyday lives. In the process, they constantly have challenges, wishes, and fears. We have to develop solutions for them - then they will also be interested in our products.
A good starting point for this is to identify insights into your target group.
When we know what problem we are solving, our marketing has a much higher impact.
💬 Your marketing story / your pitch
A pitch can be what most people think of. A presentation in front of users, investors, and an audience to get them excited about your idea.
But it can also be a simple story that you have ready to continuously inspire your target groups for your solutions.
Stories, and therefore the ability to use storytelling in marketing, have incredible power.
“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.”
Steve Jobs
I was incredibly inspired when I was in the ancient temples of Luxor, Egypt in early 2023: most of our knowledge of the 3,000+ year old culture and its pharaohs we have, through the stories they recorded in the form of hieroglyphs and wall paintings.
» Drop me a mail if you want the entire checklist «
🏋️ Does your marketing convert?
Of course, marketing also has the function of building up an image and creating attention and trust.
But at its core, marketing must sell.
And yet many companies cannot clearly say what ROI their marketing has.
Why is that?
Because 1. it is technically not always easy to measure the effect of marketing campaigns (how do I know if my poster sells?) and 2. because marketing is often done as an end in itself (I have to be active on social media, that's part of it).
That's why it's always important to me to pay attention to the effect of marketing on my projects, strategies, concepts, and coaching. After all, that's why we invest time and money in our external impact.
This also brings us back to the beginning and the relevance of goals. And once we've defined what a conversion is for us (Likes? Subscribers? Views? Sales?), then we need to create coherent actions for that as well to really achieve our measurable goals.
🤩 Your simple marketing checklist
These were now three points and a short strategic derivation for the marketing checklist I have created.
I provide the entire checklist, including the basic information around strategies, for free. All you need to do is:
» Drop me an email if you want the entire checklist «
And if you can check off all 17 items on my checklist, then your marketing is set up for sustainable success and goals.
Thanks for reading along!
PS: You can also read this posting in German.