Marketing Like An Octopus

Over the years, I have built many marketing organizations as well as developed new brands.  During this time, I have come to adopt what I term, the Octopus Strategy for Marketing.  Octopi are highly intelligent creatures who not only have distinctive tentacles they use for feeding and movement but also are highly adaptive to their surroundings.  Likewise, marketing today requires a multi-tentacle strategy that is highly adaptive to both your industry and the marketing Eco-system.  When I reference "tentacles", this is not meant to be 'channel' centric (e.g. digital, social etc.) but rather funnel-centric tactics in order to align with your brand architecture.  To develop an Octopus strategy, first develop your brand architecture upon which you can establish your company True North.  From there, identify 8 areas of the customer journey (funnel) to which you can leverage and align tactics as differentiation to support that brand.  For example, if you were developing a consumer electronics brand, the True North could be '...to create a best-in-class user experience for any in-home electronics'.  From this, you may derive your octopus tactics related to personas, geographies, rooms in home, etc.  For 'rooms in home', perhaps develop the theme to associate specific electronic devices to rooms in the home.  Once you have this 'theme', you can develop your 'tentacles'.  Eight tentacles to support the customer journey could be:

1. Inbound Content - leveraging blogs, white papers, etc. to develop thought leadership for specific rooms as they relate to specific CE devices
2. Organic Content - identify keywords and develop info architecture for SEO related to CE devices and Room permutations
3. Social Influence - identify influencers by room type and align messaging and thought leadership
4. Paid Media - target messaging and distribution with media buys associated with types of rooms
5. Conversion - qualify prospects based on type of rooms in house and leverage for sales scripts to optimize conversion
6. On-boarding - profile customers to identify rooms in home in order to build re-marketing campaigns
7. Engagement - engage known customers of room types with additional info associated with CE purchase
8. Retention - align messaging with room profiles of customers

Push and thrust now like an Octopus..adapt your marketing programs and optimize accordingly.  Good Luck.