The Steps to Simplifying Your Marketing Strategy

A Strategic Framework to Transform Your Marketing Strategy from Random Acts to Results

As the leader of your family business, you rely on a small team to make magic happen.

With marketing, though, you haven’t been able to make the magic happen.

You’ve tried one or two Facebook campaigns or an email here and there.

But you haven't seen results.

We call this “random acts of marketing.”

To put an end to your random acts, you need a framework that suits your small business and how you lead your marketing.

That’s where our Answer Vault Framework comes in.

Main Takeaways

Define Your Ideal Client Profile: Understand who your target customers are, including their demographics, goals, and challenges.
Perform an Answer Vault Audit: Evaluate your existing content to identify areas that effectively address your client's questions and those that need improvement.

Create Working Titles for Missing Content: Develop titles for new content that fills gaps in your current strategy.
Create a Content Creation Schedule: Plan a consistent schedule for producing and publishing new content.
Create a Multichannel Content Dissemination Plan: Develop a strategy for distributing your content across various platforms tailored to your audience.

What is The Answer Vault?

The Answer Vault is all about your expertise helping prospects.

You solve customer problems every day with your industry knowledge.

You’re not a marketing VP, but you do have the information needed to boost your company’s visibility right at your fingertips.

With the Answer Vault, you’ll be using what you already know to develop a structured approach to your marketing by focusing on the value you provide.

The Answer Vault Helps You Stop Random Acts of Marketing

If you’re just going through the marketing motions with no clear direction, you're missing out on potential business.

You post on social media sporadically when you find the time.

This means the algorithms won’t show your content, and prospects won’t find you. You don’t get the engagement, and you’ve wasted time.

Maybe you’ve tried blasting your email list with promotions that don’t stick, resulting in poor open rates and more unsubscribes.

Maybe you saw your competitors' marketing efforts and tried to emulate them. But it isn’t working.

5 Steps to Launch Your Answer Vault Marketing Framework

Define Your Ideal Client or Buyer Persona

The first step is to identify your company’s ideal client.

This isn’t just who your clients tend to be. This is the ideal. Who do you best serve, and who would get the most out of your product or service?

It’s not just about demographics; even two electricians serving the same area won’t have the same ideal client.

One electrician can specialize in older homes that need electrical work to pass inspection, and another electrician in the area will specialize in innovative, smart home technology—those are two very different targets.

You also need to think about where your target audience “hangs out.” Where will you better be able to reach them: on social media, by email, or by cold calls?

To help you identify your ideal client, use our guide to identify your buyer persona.

We’re not experts at AI, but we’ve established a very solid method for creating these personas using ChatGPT.

Input the data you've gathered, and ask ChatGPT to generate detailed persona profiles, including potential interests, behaviors, and preferences, using our Persona ChatGPT Guide (in progress) to create your own personas.

Perform an Answer Vault Audit

Next, you need to audit your content.

Auditing will help you identify the content you need that you don’t have, a.k.a, what questions you’re not answering.

This audit isn’t just for your website—It’s for all the material you have, all the notes in your draw, PDFs, etc.

You probably wrote a 1 on 1 email to a prospect in the last 6 months answering some questions, and it is now just sitting in your sent folder—that should be in this audit.

After you’ve collected all of your current marketing material, follow the process in our Answer Vault Audit to evaluate it.

The audit covers 12 must-have areas of content to identify in your marketing material and 3 criteria to evaluate the quality of that content, including:

Whether or not you're talking to clients in a language they understand.
If your content is easy to read and scan or Chunkified.
If your content is relevant and appropriate for your ideal client.

This will reveal the areas where your content is strong and lacks depth and help you ideate what needs to be created to fill your Answer Vault.

Create Working Titles for Missing Content

Based on the audit, your next step is to generate working content titles that fill in those gaps.

The titles should directly address your ideal client's unanswered questions, but another essential is matching these questions to the buyer’s journey.

The buyer’s journey is the steps your prospects go through before they decide to sign a contract or put in their credit card info.

The Answer Vault works because your expertise, the answers you have, guide prospects through the steps of their buying journey.

The 3 Stages of the buyer’s journey are:

The Awareness Stage: When a potential customer realizes they have a problem or a need and aren't sure how to solve it yet.

Example: Bob realizes he is constantly feeling tired and lacking energy and asks, “Why am I tired all the time?”

The Consideration Stage: When the potential buyer evaluates all the different solutions to their problem or needs.

Example: Bob starts researching all the potential causes of fatigue, asking, “How do you alleviate chronic fatigue?”

The Decision Stage: When the buyer makes a purchase decision.

Example: Bob identifies a bad mattress as a major contributor to his fatigue and asks, “Where can I get a high-quality mattress?”

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Create a Content Creation Schedule

Next, you need to plan a realistic schedule for creating new content.

The goal is 50 blog posts. That’s the magic number of content that most effectively skyrockets traffic to your website and increases leads.

In a study done by Hubspot, once a company published over 35 articles, their leads increased by 30%. Once they published 52 posts, their leads went up by 77%!

We’ve been able to replicate those results with our own clients over and over again.

With that in mind, plan your calendar with a goal of completing 50 blog posts.

Planning should include time and stages so the research, writing, editing, and publishing can get done.

Be sure to include in your schedule the content you already had that needs a revamp or reformatting.

Execution is always the hard part. Keeping momentum is key.

Getting these 50 posts out the door shouldn’t be a 2 year long effort. Establish a rhythm that works for your team without overwhelming them. Typically, this should take 6 to 12 months.

Create a Multichannel Content Dissemination Plan

You’ve created your content. Now, you need to leverage it.

You need to develop a plan for sharing the content you create across various channels and within various areas of your business.

This includes identifying the most effective platforms for your audience, determining how to repurpose content, and scheduling posts or publications across different mediums for maximum reach.

Any content you create needs to go on your website. That’s the first priority. That’s how search engines will find your expertise.
Think about your sales team. Can you leverage your content into PDFs that sales can easily send out to prospects to answer their questions?
Refer back to your ideal client and target audience and where they “hang out.” Can you leverage the content and break it down into social media content to share on Facebook or LinkedIn?

Streamline Your Marketing Efforts in More Ways Than One

How do you get all of this done?

As the CEO, you can S.E.D.O.A—simplify, eliminate, delegate, outsource, and automate.

You can find in-house talent, hire freelancers, or hire solopreneur marketers.

Or, hire us.

We’re a marketing agency that specializes in helping family-run businesses convert their random acts of marketing into streamlined sets of experiments that show results.

You can bring us on to help you make the discovery (the first 3 steps of this guide) necessary to build an effective Answer Vault.