Today, marketing is so complicated and fast-moving to the point that marketing teams are failing to reach their full potential when they don’t have a plan. For instance, there can be misinformation when two teams don’t agree on how to express your firm’s values, while deliverables created on a short notice can’t convert if you have not put in place central guiding principles.

A comprehensive, updated, and reliable marketing playbook is what they need as the guidebook to refer back to. The document can help your marketing team to get through potential confusion arising from a complex team structure, short timelines or both. A marketing playbook would allow your marketing team to consistently approach the market using a methodical and streamlined set of guidelines and tools that can efficaciously be measured and managed.

A recent survey by Marq found that consistent branding led to a 10 to 20% revenue growth for companies, with 60% of the businesses involved in the investigation stating that maintaining a strong, consistent brand was vital to generating leads and communicating with the existing clients. A marketing playbook can help your marketing team to maintain consistent branding.

What is a Marketing Playbook?

A marketing playbook is a guidebook that outlines your organization’s best practices, modes of communication, and optimization strategies for maximizing the return on investment based on predetermined marketing objectives. It also contains information on how you market your organization. Markedly, businesses employ marketing playbooks to determine how they will manage their marketing activities and investment.

The concept is founded on such sports as Baseball and American Football, where coaches employ different defensive and attacking tactics to enable their teams defeat their opponents in different situations. The coach’s playbook clearly defines each player’s role in order for the team to succeed. This allows players to consistently achieve their objectives even when there is a change of team members.

A marketing playbook works in a similar way, thereby avoiding confusion and chaos within your marketing team. This implies that the members of your marketing team will not need to reinvent the wheel to come up with new content or engagement. All the marketing team members can access the document to study your goals and messaging for your brand. As a result, they will know where they fit in your marketing plan, thus enabling them make important contributions to your promotion endeavor.

What to Include in a Marketing Playbook?

Even though your marketing needs are different from those of other enterprises, there are a couple of components that are common in all marketing playbooks. Essentially, your company’s marketing playbook should contain such information as:

Customer personas

You need to include the profiles of your priority customers in your marketing playbook to give all stakeholders access to the relevant information on how to tailor their messaging to a specific audience. This is because the client is the most important aspect in conversions and not merely the marketing strategies you employ. That’s why the marketing materials that don’t target a particular audience will most likely not work as people nowadays have set high expectations for the kind of content they want to get exposed to and interact with.

Roles and responsibilities

You should clearly define the roles and responsibilities for all the members of your marketing team in your marketing playbook. For instance, you should indicate

• The person responsible for posting on social media
• The one in charge of the content creation strategy
• How the team members contribute to projects

Laying down these roles in your marketing playbook saves you time and prevents confusion within your marketing team since having two individuals work on the same task is imprudent and a waste of energy.

Having a clear roadmap for creating marketing content can only be possible with clarity when it comes to performance of different roles, especially because promotion campaigns have now become more sprawling. Each person that interacts with your customers, from the customer care representative to the social media manager, should know what is expected of them in improving customer experience.

Go-to deliverables

Each deliverable has distinct characteristics, with some being impossible to accomplish without the necessary technical expertise, whereas others need an emotional connection to work. The best way to help your marketers create top-quality deliverables on short notice is to list your options and break down their best practices as well as advantages and disadvantages.

Branding and messaging

Brand awareness has now evolved together with the communication channels used by people to connect with companies. For instance, what a customer expects to find on your website is influenced by what they see on your Facebook page, even though you may have different people at those touchpoints.
The branding and messaging section of your marketing playbook should ensure that all information posted on different platforms follows the same strategy. Your brand should have a uniform tone, style, and visual language, including logos, colors, and fonts.

Performance statistics and results

You should avoid basing your marketing playbook on assumptions but rather on information backed by facts and experience. It’s important to know the tactics and techniques that have led to conversions or augmented engagement with a specific audience in the past. You should then use the performance of your digital deliverables and results to build your playbook.

Types of Marketing Playbooks?

Due to the ever-changing nature of marketing, there are dissimilar types of marketing playbooks, such as content creation, SEO audit, and A/B testing, you can use to help you achieve your set marketing gaols and objectives. These marketing playbooks serve diverse purposes as exemplified below.

Content creation marketing playbook

This is a structured and detailed document that outlines your best practices, processes, strategies, and guidelines for creating and disseminating content as a part of your overall marketing efforts. It acts as a comprehensive guidebook for helping your content creators, marketers, and other stakeholders know how to develop and execute a robust content marketing strategy. The good thing about this playbook is that it helps you adapt to your target audience’s changing preferences and organization’s evolving marketing objectives and goals.

This playbook is very crucial for your business, especially in the current digital age, where companies are relying on content marketing to achieve their desired outcomes. This is because each customer’s journey starts with content. When it comes to content, you should not think only about social media posts as the scope of marketing content goes beyond what you publish on different social networking platforms. For example, editorial content entails thoughtful storytelling that’s strategically created to help develop a robust connection with your target audience. In the meantime, interactive content, like maps and timelines, acts as the guideline for dealing with the problems or challenges faced by your prospects. You can also embrace other forms of content, including videos, visuals, and podcasts, whose popularity has surged over the last few decades.

The different types of content serve diverse purposes and goals. For instance, content creates emotions in audiences, thereby prompting them to take action, such as wanting to know more about your business and purchasing your products. Content also helps companies increase brand relevancy, establish brand expertise, convert sales, educate audiences about their products and services, develop interest in customers, convert leads into actual clients, and augment brand awareness.

Content marketing has proved to work wonders for enterprises. You should, hence, focus on creating high-quality content targeting specific audiences and with clear goals. Customers will always pay attention to facts, statistics, and figures about how your products can benefit them while at the same time being driven by their feelings and emotions. You can appeal to your audiences by creating narratives through videos, words, or images by reflecting human values to create strong bonds between your brand and clients. It goes without saying that an entertaining story leaves a lasting impression on the audience.

To save you time and energy in building your playbook, you can head to our website for a free template download.

SEO audit marketing playbook

This is a document that outlines strategies, processes, and steps for performing an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) audit of a website. This type of audit primarily seeks to evaluate the performance of a website in terms of user experience, search engine visibility, and overall optimization. The SEO audit playbook helps website owners, SEO experts, and marketers review and improve the organic search performance of a website.

This playbook is valuable in the digital era as it helps businesses determine whether or not their websites are ranking well for relevant keywords and search terms. An SEO audit also covers other areas of a website performance, like user experience and conversion rates. The SEO audit marketing playbook is helpful in offering you direction for more SEO activities that would provide you with the data and insight you need to have meaningful improvements, thus ranking higher on search engine result pages.

Since Google usually updates its search algorithm on a regular basis, the SEO audit marketing playbook would be vital in scheduling when to conduct an SEO audit of your website. For instance, you can decide to be performing an SEO audit after every 6 months, depending on the frequency of changes and the size of your website. That way, you can know the areas that are often flagged as being problematic and develop a game plan on how to deal with them one after the other. In his case, some issues may only require a quick fix, such as adding an alt text to an image, whereas others might need a longer-term optimization approach, like creating pillar content and strengthening web copy. With this playbook, you can be sure to have clean content that converts.

To start developing your SEO audit marketing playbook, you can download a free template here.

A/B testing marketing playbook

This is a set of guidelines that describes the strategies and best practices for undertaking A/B tests during marketing campaigns. A/B testing or split testing is a logical and systematic way of comparing two variables to determine the one that performs better in achieving a company’s goals, such as conversion rates, click-through rates, or engagement metrics. For instance, when it comes to email marketing, A/B testing involves mailing two versions of an email to different subscribers and the results of the test helps you determine the version of the email that sells. Your marketers will in turn roll out the email version to the other subscribers that didn’t receive it initially.

The A/B testing marketing playbook is without a doubt a very vital tool to your marketers. Depending on what you intend to test, your marketing team will leap a number of benefits for A/B tests. You can test different items to know how they impact your bottom line. Some of the features you may decide to test in your marketing campaigns comprise CTAs, subject lines, headers, titles, colors and fonts, blog graphics, product images, navigation, body copy, and more.
A/B testing plays a pivotal role in helping you know how your target audiences behave and relate to your promotion campaign. A/B testing is not only helpful in determining the way your audiences behave but also aids you set your future marketing goals. Some of the goals of A/B testing include increasing your website traffic and conversion rates, perfecting product images, as well as lowering cart abandonment and bounce rates.
A/B testing is very crucial in getting the best out of your marketing team. With this marketing playbook, you are bound to realize so many benefits as opposed to when not using it. To develop an ideal A/B testing marketing playbook, you can visit smartplaybooks.io for a free template download.

Conclusion

The importance of a marketing playbook in the currently complex marketing landscape can’t be overlooked. This playbook is vital for your marketing team to ensure brand consistency and help all the involved persons reach their full potential. But you’ll need to have different marketing playbooks for various marketing purposes, including content creation, SEO audit, and A/B testing.

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