4 Foundational Marketing Elements Every Business Needs and Why

We realized that there were four foundational marketing elements that every client needed. Every project that didn’t do well was missing one or more of these pillars. Here are the four marketing pillars we discovered were essential to client success.

April 6, 2022

Have you ever wondered why a marketing project fell flat? Maybe you had a great idea, but somewhere along the way, you realized that you weren’t getting the results you hoped for. 

We’ve been in that same boat. The good news is we figured out what was wrong and developed a solution that significantly improved a marketing project’s ability to succeed. 

And yes -- we plan to share what we learned.

We realized that there were four foundational marketing elements that every client needed. Every project that didn’t do well was missing one or more of these pillars. Here are the four marketing pillars we discovered were essential to client success. 

Clearly Defined Branding

There is often confusion about the difference between your branding and your Brand. Your Brand is the feeling that people get when they interact with you. What impression do they get when they hear your name or see your logo?

Branding uses tools to visually and verbally say something about your Brand. This includes colors, logos, fonts, slogans, icons, and more. 

The goal is to create a visual identity for your company so that customers can recognize who you are even without your name represented. 

Clearly Defined Messaging

Messaging is how your organization talks about itself and the value you provide. It's not just the words you use, but your tone, style, and voice. 

It’s also how you communicate with your target audience. You want your audience to know who you are and why that matters to them. How do you effectively meet their needs? What problems do they have that you solve? 

If you don’t know who your audience is, it’s going to be difficult to tell them what they need. Building personas--outlining a description of each of your target customers based on data or research--helps you choose the right message for the right people. We have created a Personas Workshop to help you better define your audience and how to speak to them! Ask us about it here. 

Most importantly, you need to know how to talk about it from the customer’s perspective. You can talk about yourself all day long, but if the customer doesn’t understand how it impacts them or why they should care, it’s just words on a page. 

Learn more about why messaging is an essential piece of your marketing plan here! 

Optimized Social and Ad Accounts

There are several ways to get your message out into the world. Social and ad accounts are two great ways to run paid and unpaid campaigns. 

Do you have the correct social accounts set up? Are advertising profiles and accounts ready to support campaigns?

When you launch a social or ad campaign, you have a goal in mind. Do all your assets point towards reaching this goal? You increase your chances of success when you have optimized social and ad accounts before launching a marketing campaign! 

A Website Ready to Convert

As you draw users closer to becoming leads or clients, what do you want them to do? Whether filling out a form, signing up for a subscription, ordering a product, or asking for a quote, they need to know where to go and how to do this. 

The doors between traffic and leads are often sitting somewhere on your website. If they landed on a page about your new service and they’re interested, but there’s no clear next step, they won’t spend time hunting it down. Or maybe they found your page through a strategic Google search, but the page took so long to load they gave up. 

Here are some questions to ask yourself to know the difference between a website and a website that is helping you reach your goals:

Let your website be a tool, not a turnoff! 

Establishing These Four Marketing Pillars

Other marketing elements can help you build your strategy even more, but we have found these four to be the necessary foundations for any project. 

We now won’t accept new client projects until they have these four pillars in place because without these, we don’t believe we can serve our clients with complete integrity. But we also help companies build and establish these four pillars! 

Whether they decide to become a client of ours or not, our goal is to help them connect, convert, and thrive with the knowledge we have gained over the past several years.

Contact us here to learn more about building your foundational marketing elements! 

Writer: Gabrielle Mingus
Editor: SK Vaugn

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