Maximize Customer Retention and Attraction with Strategic Marketing

By now, you should know that investing in strategic marketing can be a great way to make your company evolve in different ways using the digital world, whether it's by attracting new customers or increasing your brand's reach.

In this article, we'll explain a little more about what strategic marketing actually is, as well as some of the strategies used by 4RevOps / mkt4edu with its clients that guarantee the retention and attraction of new clients.

Strategic marketing to retain and attract customers

Strategic marketing is about aligning positioning, value proposition, channels and message with business objectives, with decisions guided by research and data. Instead of one-off actions, it defines medium- and long-term priorities to consistently attract, convert and retain customers. In practice, this involves planning, defining the audience and persona, inbound marketing throughout the funnel and analysis routines to adjust whatever is necessary. The focus is on the audience's pains and the organization's differentials, strengthening reach, conversion and retention.

• • Align positioning, value proposition, channels and message with business objectives.

  • Prioritize decisions guided by research and data, with a focus on the medium and long term.

  • Attract, convert and retain with consistency, avoiding loose actions.

  • Measure results continuously and adjust execution when necessary.

What you'll see in today's content

• Practical definition of strategic marketing and what it aligns with the business.

• Why focusing on audience pains and organizational differentiators improves execution and measurement.

• How 4RevOps / mkt4edu applies strategic marketing to retention and acquisition.

• Planning stages, including data collection and market research.

• Creation of an ideal customer profile, target audience and persona variations.

• Use of inbound marketing in the attraction, conversion and sales stages, with forms and landing pages.

• Routine listening, content adaptation, audience education and engagement in comments and messages.

• Remarketing, tools such as HubSpot, and continuous analysis with reports for transparency.

Cool, right? So, let's read on!

What is strategic marketing?

First of all, we want you to understand what strategic marketing is, as well as its function and importance, since understanding its concept is the basis for being able to create an efficient strategy that follows its principles.

In practical terms, strategic marketing is about aligning positioning, value proposition, channels and message with business objectives, with decisions guided by research and data. Rather than loose actions, it defines medium- and long-term priorities to consistently attract, convert and retain.

How important is strategic marketing?

Strategic marketing focuses on two areas that are crucial to the success of your strategy: the pains that potential customers have and your organization's differentials.

With your entire marketing strategy focused on these two factors, the operational part will be carried out more efficiently. In addition, the stages of measuring results and making decisions will be better targeted.

In retention, small gains often have a big impact on the bottom line. A study cited by the Harvard Business Review shows that increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits by between 25% and 95%. For educational institutions, this translates into fewer dropouts, more re-enrolments and a healthier LTV.

How does 4RevOps / mkt4edu use strategic marketing strategies to retain and attract customers?

But how do you apply strategic marketing in practice? Below you'll learn about some of the steps applied by 4RevOps / mkt4edu to ensure that its clients retain and attract customers through this strategy.

We carry out strategic marketing planning

The first stage is planning. Through it, we carry out a complete survey of data to better understand what the institution is and what its objectives are and the public it wants to reach.

We also carry out thorough market research to understand the threats and opportunities in the area and how we can work them into our strategy, so as not to have any external surprises.

The support of organizations in this initial stage makes all the difference, since no one is better at talking about the company than the company itself. You can also provide information about the company's current customer base.

With all this data in hand, we can get a complete picture of the institution, what context it is in and what its objectives are in terms of marketing strategy.

• objectives and goals (e.g. enrollment, qualified leads, re-enrollment);
• audiences/personas and journey;
• channels, budget and timetable;
• KPIs and analysis routine.

We create the ideal customer profile

As well as knowing the company itself, you also need to have a wealth of information on the other end of this strategy: the target audience. Here, our focus is on outlining the ideal customer profile it hopes to receive.

However, we don't just stop at defining the target audience, we also try to create the ideal persona for the business, i.e. a semi-fictitious representation of the type of customer who could have their pains solved by the company.

Defining the target audience and persona can be done with the help of that customer base we talked about earlier, in which we can collect information such as gender, age, where they live and the reasons that led them to buy the product or service offered by the organization.

If the institution has more than one audience, it is ideal that it also has variations of the persona, to ensure that the marketing strategies adopted are always speaking to the right person.

We bet on inbound marketing

Another step we prioritize is how to use inbound marketing intelligently within a strategic marketing strategy. After all, it is through the actions taken at this stage that we are able to put into practice all the lessons learned when gathering information about the company and its audience.

Within inbound marketing, we have strategies and actions aimed at the three stages of the sales funnel: attraction, conversion and sale. Each of these requires action on different channels, but all are geared towards the goals of the institution, the persona and the target audience you want to reach.

For example, in the attraction stage, content marketing is a widely used tool, in which content should be written with a view to what the company's future customers are interested in reading and, at the same time, highlight the company's expertise and differentials.

In the conversion stage, we work with forms and landing pages aimed at collecting strategic information from users and converting them into leads that can be better worked on by the company's sales team.

For this to really work, the ideal is to define qualification criteria (lead scoring), an SLA between marketing and sales and a nurturing cadence by profile/course. This integration is a pillar of RevOps, because it prevents leads from "going cold" and improves the sales team's performance.

We try to say what customers want to hear

It's very important that strategic marketing always pays attention to what customers want to hear from companies. After all, our goal is to build a solid relationship between both parties.

That's why it's also worth listening to what users have to say. Whether it's comments on blog posts on social networks, or even viewing data and engagement with publications, it's possible to get an idea of the content, subjects and approaches that make the most sense.

Having said that, 4RevOps / mkt4edu tries to plan the creation of digital content in advance, but at the same time monitors the results and makes adaptations so that this stage is increasingly aligned with the specific persona that a given organization has.

This is also very helpful in defining the brand's image and tone of voice; users themselves can give clues as to whether they prefer a more relaxed or more serious communication.

See also:

• What lead nurturing is and how it helps in attracting students

• 4 student loyalty strategies for universities

• 5 fundamental actions for university marketing

We educate users

Just as important as saying what customers want to hear is saying what customers need to know. To do this, the institution needs to show itself to be an expert in its field through the content it publishes.

We create content aimed at educating users, which allows the company to show that it understands exactly the situation the user is going through and knows exactly what they need to do to solve this pain.

At the same time, this also makes the relationship between the company and the user closer, as they consume more content from your blog or website or even follow your social networks.

However, this relationship can't stop at just producing content: the organization needs to ensure engagement with these people, responding to comments and direct messages.

We do remarketing

Often, the marketing strategy manages to reach the right person, but not at the right time or in the ideal way. That's why having an effective remarketing strategy makes all the difference to strategic and efficient marketing.

In this way, we can create specific strategies for those users who have shown some interest in becoming customers of the institution, but for some reason have not yet finalized a purchase.

Remarketing works best when it re-engages those who have already shown intent (visit, form, course page), with controlled segmentation and frequency. To sustain performance over the long term, the campaign needs to follow good privacy and consent practices, as set out in the ANPD's Guidance on cookies and personal data protection.

However, this marketing campaign must be carried out intelligently, using the information that the user already has about him and the company's differentials that can have the expected effect on this second approach.

Image: Team meeting to define priorities and strategic marketing actions based on data and objectives.

We rely on the support of powerful tools

To ensure that our work is of an even higher quality, we rely on the support of powerful tools and partners who help us design and implement high-performance strategies for our clients.

One of these partners is HubSpot, a platform that integrates marketing, sales and service into a single ecosystem. This helps to standardize processes, centralize data and speed up decisions, especially when the strategy requires consistency between acquisition, nurturing, conversion and retention.

With HubSpot, we can scale nutrition and conversion with more autonomy: create pages, automate communications and track performance by campaign. A highlight is content personalization, which uses CRM data to adapt messages and pages to the lead's profile, with more relevance and a better experience.

We also offer training to our clients who want to use the platform and thus optimize other sectors of their company, such as sales and customer service.

We show the results of our marketing strategies

So far, you've understood how we plan and execute strategic marketing strategies, but our work doesn't stop there: we also try to collect and analyze the results of our actions.

In this way, we are able to understand what is working and what needs to be improved in order to achieve our clients' expectations and, above all, guarantee a close relationship between the organization and its public.

As we said at the beginning of this post, strategic marketing focuses on medium and long-term results, but we analyze and collect information all the time, since small changes can be welcome when necessary, in order to obtain the best results.

And in order to guarantee transparency in communication between 4RevOps / mkt4edu and its clients, we invest in creating complete reports for our clients, showing the entire process of our strategies and the best solutions for improving rates that have not met expectations.

Why might a strategic marketing agency be what your company needs?

As you can see, strategic marketing is very important and can make all the difference to your business's success in terms of reach and conversions, especially online.

To get away from "trial and error", it's worth relying on a multidisciplinary team to design and execute a marketing plan with clear goals, channels, messages and indicators. This way, the institution attracts the right audience and improves conversion without losing consistency over time.

In short: we use strategic marketing to attract and retain customers through strategic planning, mapping the ideal customer, creating inbound marketing content that speaks to what the customer wants to hear and educates users, remarketing and analyzing results.

So? Did you manage to understand what it is, how to do strategic marketing planning and how it can help retain and attract customers? Here at 4RevOps / mkt4edu, we invest heavily in implementing strategies that really deliver results for our clients.

So don't waste any more time: visit our website, find out more about our work and contact us over a cup of coffee!

Frequently asked questions about strategic marketing, retention and attraction

What is strategic marketing?

Strategic marketing is about aligning positioning, value proposition, channels and message with business objectives, with decisions guided by research and data. It defines medium- and long-term priorities to consistently attract, convert and retain.

Why is strategic marketing important?

Strategic marketing is important because it keeps the focus on potential customers' pains and the organization's differentials. As a result, operational execution tends to be more efficient, and results measurement and decision-making are better targeted.

What steps go into strategic marketing planning?

Strategic marketing planning involves gathering data to understand the institution, its objectives and the public it wants to reach, as well as market research to map threats and opportunities. It can also consolidate objectives and targets, audiences and journeys, channels, budget, timetable, KPIs and analysis routines.

What changes when you create an ideal client profile, target audience and persona?

Creating the ideal customer profile, target audience and persona helps the strategy speak to the right person. When there is more than one audience, variations of the persona help to keep actions aligned with the different profiles.

How does inbound marketing fit into the strategy?

Inbound marketing organizes actions for attraction, conversion and sales, acting on different channels, always directed towards the institution's objective and the defined profile. In attraction, content marketing focuses on the interests of the public and highlights expertise and differentials; in conversion, forms and landing pages collect information to generate leads.

What are lead scoring and SLAs between marketing and sales for?

Lead scoring and SLA serve to define qualification criteria, align responsibilities and prevent leads from going cold. Integration between marketing and sales improves the sales team's utilization and supports nurturing by profile or course.

How do you adjust content to what your audience wants to hear without losing consistency?

Adjusting content involves monitoring comments, viewing data and engagement to understand the topics and approaches that work best. At the same time, prior planning and ongoing adaptations are maintained to bring communication closer to the persona and the desired tone of voice.

Why does educating users help with acquisition and relationships?

Educating users helps because it demonstrates expertise, brings the relationship closer and shows an understanding of the public's pains. To sustain this relationship, it is also important to ensure engagement by responding to comments and direct messages.

When does remarketing make a difference?

Remarketing makes a difference when the strategy reaches the right person, but not at the right time or with the ideal approach. It allows you to re-engage those who have shown interest, with controlled segmentation and frequency, using information already available and differentials that strengthen the second approach.

How do tools like HubSpot support execution?

Tools like HubSpot support execution by integrating marketing, sales and service into a single ecosystem. This helps standardize processes, centralize data, automate communications, create pages, track performance by campaign and personalize content based on CRM data.

Why measure results all the time, even with a medium- and long-term focus?

Measuring results continuously helps to identify what is working and what needs to be improved. Small changes can be welcome in order to meet expectations and maintain a close relationship with the public, as well as supporting transparency with complete reports.