The 3 C’s of Effective Marketing

The Three C’s of effective marketing

The three C’s of effective marketing are company, customer, and competition. Learn how each should influence your marketing campaigns.

1. Company

Marketing is all about branding. Start by refining your company’s mission statement and building a brand that represents it accurately. That way, people will understand who you are and what to expect from your business, and you’ll feel more confident in your marketing messages.

Jessica Garrett Modkins, founder and CEO of Hip Rock Star Advertising, said employees and consumers “want to know what your brand, company, or business stands for.”

“This is the time to build your strategy around the issues that matter to the very fabric of your service,” Garrett Modkins said. “This is an opportunity to evaluate your corporation’s heartbeat.”

Marketing efforts that reflect your company’s identity and core values remind your customers who you are beneath the surface, which is crucial in today’s socially responsible business climate. Consistency — another C word you can learn more about below — is also critical when representing your company, said Daniel Foley Carter, founder and director of SEO Stack.

“Having strong values and ideals for the company is important to make sure that all marketing for a business is done in the same way each time,” he said.

2. Customer

Your customers are the reason for your business and the driving force behind all you do. It’s essential to communicate with them personally when developing marketing plans, rather than simply buying ad space or pushing your products and services without any customer research.

“You have to know your customer base well and make sure you are pitching to them. Make your product exactly what they need,” Foley Carter said. “Your marketing should speak to them, not just be shown to them.”

That is especially true on social media, where many customers vet businesses before purchasing from them. You can get to know your customers by engaging with them on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. 

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Creating a social media account, however, shouldn’t be something you just check off your list. To benefit from it and connect with your customers, you’ll want to dig a little deeper.

“Your customer is relying on you to communicate with them — staying top of mind,” said Garrett Modkins. “Run a campaign using social media, requesting your customer base to provide their name, email address, telephone number, and other industry-specific information you need to stay in touch with them when they are no longer active on social media. Use this database to expand your communication with coupons, testimonials, and how-to videos exclusive to this platform.”

3. Competition

Regardless of the industry your business is in, you’ll always have competition — and that’s a good thing. You’re doing something right if you have direct competitors, but you’ll want to understand how they market themselves and any gaps they fill that you don’t. Their marketing can shed light on what you should and shouldn’t do with yours.

Although it’s essential to keep up with your competitors, they shouldn’t be all you think about.

“Competition should be evaluated but not stalked,” Foley Carter said. “Remember, your competitors should be worried about you, not the other way around. Continue to innovate and they will not be competition anymore.”

To differentiate yourself from your competition, personalize your messaging whenever possible. Storytelling is an instant way to connect with your customers, Garrett Modkins said.

“This is the surefire way to give a point of differentiation between your company and the competition,” she said. “Seek out success stories with your customers. Take these stories and amplify this message through marketing tactics to bring in new customers. Every brand has a good success story, which can lead to deeper customer engagement.”

Take your clients on a journey. Tell them how your company can help solve their problem better than your competitors, and make sure every story has a beginning, middle, and end. Don’t reduce your brand stories to cliche marketing materials or sales pitches. Instead, treat them as opportunities to let your brand’s personality shine through and connect on a deeper level with customers.

Additional C’s of marketing

In addition to the traditional three C’s of marketing above, we recommend ensuring that your marketing also reflects the below principles.

Compelling

“Compelling” is defined as evoking interest or attention in an irresistible way. It’s also the opposite of boring. For effective marketing, your brand messaging needs to capture your audience’s attention and not bore them like the hundreds of cookie-cutter advertising pitches they are bombarded with every day.

At a time when consumers’ attention spans are so short, carefully consider what you can do to ensure that the marketing messages you create resonate genuinely with your clients in a convincing, robust, and credible way. It’s vital to understand what your ideal clients are interested in and offer them a compelling reason to notice your brand.

If your marketing is quickly forgotten — or, worse, not noticed — it’s a red flag that you’re doing something wrong. Here are the steps to fix that:

• Dig deeper into your marketing metrics from a recent campaign to study what worked and what didn’t.
• Evaluate how much or how little you’ve achieved your goals and how you may need to course-correct.
• Conduct customer research, including surveys, to determine your customers’ biggest pain points and challenges.
• Collect relevant data and turn it into actionable insights. Big data can help small businesses grow if they know how to harness it.  
• Create marketing campaigns based on those insights.
• Test the effectiveness of your marketing content. Your following will indicate what they like by responding, sharing, and taking action. The campaigns that fetch the best results will tell you how you should focus your future efforts.

Consistent

Marketing requires a consistent drumbeat to steadily build up your brand’s awareness and credibility. You can’t expect overnight results, and you certainly can’t expect to get thousands of followers despite never posting a single article on your company’s LinkedIn page. Frequency matters a lot when it comes to your marketing efforts, but it’s even more critical to ensure that everything about your brand looks, feels, and sounds consistent.

Businesses often struggle in that area. They throw different and inconsistent messages against the wall to see what sticks. Unfortunately little does, and it confuses your customers and leaves your company with brand awareness and identity issues. In contrast, when your target customers hear the same core message several times, they are more likely to understand your brand and spread the word.

If you’re unsure whether your branding and marketing efforts have been consistent, a content audit is a great place to start. Assess company blog posts, whitepapers, bylines, case studies, social media posts, and other forms of content to check if every aspect of your brand’s presence looks and feels consistent across every channel. Also, look for consistency in all customer-facing material: email signatures, business cards, letterhead, invoices, envelopes, fax sheets, and all other things related to your brand.

Cohesive

Customers likely find you and interact with your company in a variety of ways, including through public relations, social media, websites, videos, email, sales meetings, and events. Your efforts across all marketing channels, however, should create a cohesive story.

That doesn’t mean repeating the same message mindlessly over and over again in a way that borders on spamming. Instead, it’s about finding the central theme that will resonate with your clients and then carrying that golden thread throughout every touchpoint. Simply put, presenting a marketing campaign that isn’t thematically united is like arriving at a party wearing mismatched clothes: People may notice you, but they won’t take you seriously and are likely to be confused about what point you’re trying to make. With cohesive marketing, there’s a throughline connecting all representations of your brand.

In today’s rapidly changing marketplace, the customer may seem like a moving target, constantly flitting among different channels and displaying an incredibly diverse range of behaviors and preferences. But the C’s of marketing will help you develop solid engagement strategies and highly relatable content to capture mindshare, build market share effectively, and dominate your industry.

Kimberlee Leonard and Stacey Danheiser contributed to this article. Source interviews were conducted for a previous version of this article.