The volume of inbound marketing resources out there is staggering. In fact, some marketers that I talk to feel that they are overcome by a feeling of paralysis of not knowing where and how to start. Many marketers are doubtful about how they can adapt those marketing concepts to their own unique business positions. For them, my advice is always to take a step back and consider the fact that these concepts are tools, and these tools can be, and must be, adapted to help them.

With that in mind, I want to talk about five marketing ideas that are highly adaptable and have shown that they are a good fit for almost everyone. I’m not going to deep dive into how to execute these ideas. Instead, I want to help you take a step back and look at the big picture. Not getting caught up with the execution details allows you clarity to see how to fit each idea into your own marketing strategy. After you have truly understood and appreciated the ideas would you be able to focus on the methods and tools that can help you achieve them.

1. Personalisation

This is a huge topic, and rightly so because relevant marketing is not going away anytime soon. If all you are doing now for personalisation is starting your bulk emails with “Dear {FirstName}”, then you are missing out.

Personalisation is all about how to speak directly to the needs and wants of your audience. Since not everyone is the same, it makes sense that how you speak to them needs to be different. A blanket marketing message that targets everyone, targets no one.

Personalisation is not just in the content that you write–you have to think of it more than just marketing copy. It can be how you reach them: what social media networks do your different target segments frequent and what kind of tone to use on these platforms? Or what kind of content types (blogs, photos, videos, chats, podcasts, etc.) do they engage with the most? Or think about the when: what’s the best time to reach out to them in the day or week?

2. Content and Storytelling

You’ve heard this all the time: content is king. Yet, many marketers are not devoting enough attention to content. Don’t get too caught up with SEO and design, until you have worked out a solid editorial calendar. We have witnessed it far too often: good content will draw in the crowd, even if UI and design is not optimal, but a good design with poor content is almost certainly going to fail.

Are you already constantly putting out content? Good! Then, you might want to consider using storytelling in your content to tell your marketing story. Everyone loves a good story, and through storytelling, you reveal a side of your organisation that appeals to your targeted segments.

I attended a brand storytelling workshop recently, and within the small group of business owners, one word kept popping up — authenticity. It’s amazing everyone craves for authenticity, not just those on the receiving end. While it may be tempting to shape yourself to sound like one of the big brands, you run the risk of sounding hollow and putting yourself in a disadvantage of having to stand out with the same message as everyone else. People want authenticity, and it’s brands that invest the time and effort to find their true story and walk their own talk that truly capture the imaginations of those that they want to reach.

3. Personas

The topic of buyer personas is so important that, even though it’s one tactic under the broad topic of personalisation, it warrants a discussion point all on its own.

Buyer personas are one of the key factors to successful personalisation that I talked about earlier. Building personas can be fun and rewarding, once you get past the beginning stage of understanding what buyer personas are. I know this, because all the marketers that we have worked with find the entire process necessary and not too intimidating once they got into it. While it’s important to ultimately come up with good personas, what I find even more valuable is the process that goes into building out these personas. Through the process, marketers begin to look deeper into understanding their target audience at a more human level, rather than only seeing them as statistics and bundles of attributes. And this is important, why? Because it’s only when you start to think of your target audience this way that you will begin to feel more natural in personalising content and weaving in storytelling that will evoke emotions in them.

For me, if there’s only one thing you take away from this post, make it buyer personas. Very often, the process of developing personas causes a sea change in how marketers look at the potential of the different ways to reach out to their customers, and this change propagates through all the other points that I touch on in this post. It changes how they craft their marketing messages and how they measure reach and engagement.

4. Buyer’s Journey

If personalisation is about reaching the right people at the right time, and buyer personas are about targeting the right people, then buyer’s journey is about getting them at the right time.

Our engagement process with our targeted audience can be modelled as what we call the “engagement continuum”. Whether you are targeting consumers, business customers, partners or employees, as long as you need to engage them, that process can be described by this continuum.

Understanding what kind of content and deals your buyers need at each stage of their buying journeys is key to being relevant and useful to them in their decision making process. This exercise, like buyer personas, forces you to step into the shoes of your target audience and think through the what and how to present content to them at the time that makes the most sense.

5. Attribution

Data is a marketer’s best weapon. Go beyond sessions and pageviews in your Google Analytics, and start looking at tracking how different campaigns, sources and media are contributing to the success of your marketing. As you start engaging customers on a myriad of platforms, it becomes crucial to be able to report on the true effectiveness of each campaign and channel through calculating their respective ROIs.

The topic of attribution is gaining a lot of traction as more marketers move away from the less-nuanced last-click attribution model in favour of attribution models that take into account of the proliferation of omni-channel marketing, such as time-decay and position-based attribution models. Google’s data-driven attribution is also a huge thing to pay attention to, and it’s a safe bet that this area will continue to grow and more tools will be available to marketers of all sizes.

Parting notes

I hope this post can guide you towards a mindset change on what these marketing concepts are really about and help you understand how each of these concepts could fit into your own marketing story. With this clarity, it can help you be more focused on what you must do, how you should do it, and do it in a way that’s most relevant to you.

Have you tried these yourself, or do you have your own ideas to share? Let us know in the comments.