Ashley D. Su 
A powerful, action-oriented marketing process is a essential part of each organization, and offers a huge opportunity to differentiate and grow your business.
There are clear advantages to developing a marketing process: a marketing process activates the marketing plan, creates control, guides priorities, generates accountability, and provides a way to measure your results, as well as the processes of lead generation, sales and customer service to develop.
The general rule is this: the more you set up a marketing process, the greater the return on investment.
However, developing a marketing process with the tools, strategies, and tactics that you need isn’t easy. It takes planning, thinking time, ideas and set-up, a long-term vision, internal and external expertise and often a willingness to do something and do it.
Over all, this requires the capacity be patient. It takes a while for prospects to trust you, and if you change your marketing, media, and identity, it’s hard to trust you. Success comes to those who start with a plan and have the patience to go beyond the need for instant results.
4 essential elements of a successful marketing process
1. Plan your marketing using a strategic approach to clearly identify your target market, define your positioning and create an identity.
Discovering your target market or ideal customer is a fundamental building block in getting any business on the right track.
Your marketing requires a positioning strategy to be successful. You need to carve out a mental position for yourself in the minds of your target market or ideal clients.
Your identity is everything a customer or prospect sees and hears about you and, most importantly, what they remember about you. The basis of an identity is who you are and what you do.
2. Build a marketing foundation that consists of an online content platform, social media profiles and marketing content.
When I talk about an online content platform, it’s a digital property that you own: a website, podcast, quarterly magazine, weekly newsletter, slide sharing presentations, or even a television show. You have to be the producer of the content and create an asset.
Social media profiles are a great place to start, as this is where the attention of ideal customers shifts. It is also very, very important to understand that you do not own these profiles, you rent them.
3. Implement and execute the marketing strategy with the right promotion and lead generation tactics.
Proper implementation and execution of today’s lead generation activities (regardless of the size of your business) is about always communicating, sharing information and solving problems, throughout a lifetime. pedagogical approach which mixes the use of public relations, networking, referrals and advertising.
4. Maintain long-term marketing by implementing lead generation, sales and customer service processes.
The main reason marketing efforts fail is because they take too long.
How much of your staff or time do you spend reinventing the marketing and sales wheel?
With the marketing processes in place, everything you need to attract, educate, follow and convert a prospect is there. Organizations can even put tools and processes in place to automate many of their marketing functions.
