“Trust the process.”
—Nick Saban
Imagine if you woke up every day and didn’t have a process to get ready for work. On Monday you brush your teeth first, then randomly complete your “routine” in no particular order.
On Tuesday, you roll out of bed, put on your clothes, then shower.
How well do you think your life would work? Not well at all! Humans are creatures of habit for a reason. Habits—good or bad—help us get things done. Muscle memory develops over time so we can act without thinking about every little action that keeps us productive.
Fail to develop and continuously improve the right processes over time and you’ll soon be showering in your clothes.
In business, we also develop processes. Any successful business is a collection of processes and systems developed and improved over time. And many industries—like marketing—experience dramatic change that requires the constant review and alteration of process.
Fail to develop and continuously improve the right processes over time and you’ll soon be showering in your clothes.
Element 47 has developed a process for developing effective brands, websites, and marketing campaigns. It boils down to three steps:
- Discover
- Build
- Grow
Discover: Let’s Make a Plan
While we may make marketing look easy, it’s a complicated and interconnected mess. Overlook the details and you can spend thousands of dollars with zero return. In order to make sure that doesn’t happen, we develop a written strategy document that details what we know about our customer and how we’ll approach their brand, website, and marketing.
Yes, we write it down. Yes, we want everyone involved to know the details. Have you ever seen the Cleveland Browns play football? That’s what things look like when you don’t have a cohesive plan. Coaches aren’t coordinated. Players are doing their own thing. There’s no cohesive process and plan to WIN THE GAME.
In football, you lose without a good plan. In business, your marketing fails. This is why Nick Saban talks about “the process” all the time. “Do your job and follow the process” is his line. And for the most part, it works. It works because someone has already considered all the details and orchestrated the actions necessary to achieve the goal.
Build: Implementing the Plan
With a mutually-agreed-upon plan and strategy under our arm, we start building your brand, website, and/or marketing machine. It’s all there, in black and white, ready to be implemented. Design the logo, create collateral material, design and code the website.
The build phase is exciting. The fruits of our discovery work begin to take a tangible shape. Logo? We have an exacting process. Website? Same.
Remember, trust the process.
Grow: Watering the Seed
Once we’ve built all the necessary assets, it’s time to turn the machine on! Google Ads, email marketing (yes, it works), social media, content marketing, SEO—all the channels we’ve hand-picked during the discovery process come to life. And we water each seed meticulously. Every week, growing and nurturing the marketing campaign to meet the goals we established together.
And just like I knew my dad was full of…fertilizer, we know that even the best-laid plans are flawed. We constantly monitor the effectiveness of our marketing approach, pivoting and trying new tactics as we get immediate feedback via analytics, analysis, and real-world testing data.
And frankly, this is when it gets fun…because we set goals way back in the Discover step and now we get to see them become a reality.
I could go on, but that’s our process in a nutshell. We’re proud of being process-driven but with a very human face and personality. If you’re interested in talking about your company and how our process might help, I’d love to connect.