The Best of Both Worlds: Mixing Up Your Marketing Strategy

Think your brand needs to go viral to make an impact? Think again. While viral marketing moments definitely help boost results, the strongest strategies usually consist of a mix between quiet, consistent tactics and special key moments designed for virality. Incorporating both can drive impact by helping you stay consistent while also wowing your audience with dynamic campaigns sprinkled in throughout the year.

Flashy content can help boost your brand's impact – but it's the quiet, consistent moments that really build up your community and drive audience loyalty. Here, we’ll go over the difference between consistent and key strategies, examples of each, and how to incorporate both into your marketing calendar for optimal results. Let’s dive in. 

Consistent vs. Key Marketing Moments

When looking at your marketing strategy calendar for the year, you should see a mix of growth tactics that include both regularly-scheduled campaigns as well as one-off, special strategies sprinkled in either monthly or quarterly. What’s the difference between these?

Experimenting vs. staying steady. Your growth tactics that are implemented consistently every month help move your business forward, even if they don’t routinely wow your audience or shake things up. These include things like paid ads, SEO campaigns, email newsletters, community building, or outreach. On the other hand, your key campaigns allow you to experiment with how your audience will react to various strategies that you don’t put out consistently, whether through giveaways, influencer collaborations, brand events, podcast features, or promotions.

Building brand loyalty vs. making a splash. While your consistent marketing materials help you build up brand loyalty and community by providing a steady stream of content for your audience to interact with, your special campaigns should be made to make a bigger impact, widen your reach, and ultimately boost your brand’s growth.

Staying consistent vs. being creative. Your consistent campaigns make sure that you’re building up a brand identity with a steady tone and persona. Your one-off campaigns, on the other hand, allow you to be bold and creative with your choices to truly test what resonates and works best. One is for quietly building your community, the other is for making a loud impact with bold choices you wouldn’t otherwise implement. One is constant background noise, the other is a bang.

Now that we’ve gone over the core differences between your consistent and one-off marketing strategies, let’s go over examples of these and how each can benefit your brand in the long term. 

Steady vs. Bold Marketing Strategies

Your steady marketing strategies are ones that you plan for every day, every week, or every month. They include things like your social media calendar, paid advertisements, newsletters, email marketing, community building, or consumer outreach. While on their own these don’t necessarily boost the bottom line for your brand, when combined, they can make a big difference for building brand loyalty, growing your community, and cementing your brand’s identity in an overcrowded digital marketplace. 

Your one-off growth events, on the other hand, are strategic campaigns that are created, launched, and tracked with the purpose of boosting your brand’s growth. This includes things like podcast features, influencer collaborations, brand partnerships, events, giveaways, TV appearances, or promotions. 

It’s important to note that while any of these special campaigns will probably include elements of the consistent marketing tools mentioned earlier, they are not the same – they are one-off, intentional marketing strategies placed thoughtfully in your marketing calendar as key projects rather than any regularly scheduled programming. If you’re not sure exactly how or where to place these campaigns, we’ll go over creating a marketing calendar with both tactics in the next section. 

Creating Your Marketing Calendar

Now that we’ve gone over the differences between your consistent and “big moment” marketing tactics, you might be wondering: how do I manage and plan for both throughout the year? It can feel tricky and overwhelming to place overlapping campaigns on your calendar, but with the right planning, you can continue sharing your consistent materials while also making room for your strategic campaigns. 

When designing your marketing calendar for the year or quarter, first write out the consistent tactics you will implement regularly, whether paid ads, SEO marketing, or your weekly newsletter. Carve out some time in your own calendar to create this content and schedule this content in bulk, whether weekly or monthly, so it will automatically run without you needing to even think about it every day. 

Once you have a plan for your “background noise” tactics, start thinking about key campaigns where you can be creative, make an impact, and drive business growth. Start with a monthly campaign you can conceptualize, build, and launch. This could be an influencer collaboration, a brand event, a promotional campaign, or even something like a giveaway. These campaigns will require less automation and more immediate attention throughout their runs, so plan for them to take up a bigger chunk of your calendar time. 

While there’s no one-size-fits-all sweet spot for creating the perfect marketing calendar, you’ll probably notice that many of your favorite brands implement both consistent and “big moment” marketing tactics to drive a true impact and build community while also keeping things fresh, exciting, and interesting. Being consistent isn’t enough anymore – going the extra mile with special campaigns to wow your audience can make a big difference for your brand.