How much should we spend? This is one of the most common questions in marketing. As brands put together strategies for how they can reach more customers and grow their business, they often don’t know how to set an exact budget.

For marketing to be effective, it needs a variety of aligned elements that work together to produce a cohesive brand, vision, message, and strategy. To give your marketing what it needs to succeed, here are the eight essential marketing assets your brand should own, manage, and regularly review.

In 2020, many brick-and-mortar businesses had to pivot. With their doors shut, they had to find another way to serve customers -- so they built an online store. Many brands launched eCommerce stores to help their business survive COVID-19 lockdowns.

Now, many brands are realizing that the opportunities of an online store can outlast COVID-19 closures. An online store can continue to create additional revenue, especially when you optimize and amplify it.

If you want to continually attract your ideal audience and encourage them to take a step toward working with you, you need an effective lead generation strategy. And, that doesn’t mean simply adding a contact form to your website.

To effectively and consistently generate quality leads, you need a variety of elements that help you reach the right audience and encourage them to take action.

To build a fully functional lead generation strategy, use these eleven elements of an effective lead generation strategy.

Advertising is one component of a larger marketing strategy. It specifically refers to the tactics used to make customers aware of a business, product, or service. Advertising involves paying a third-party media or channel to promote your brand to their audience. Advertising exists in many forms, from traditional outlets (TV ads, newspaper ads, billboards, etc.) to digital platforms (display ads, search ads, social media ads, etc.).

As our team reflected on this year, a common observation of success surfaced -- consistency. When we align well with clients, we find we are receiving valuable feedback from their teams to keep our processes moving along in a timely manner. We find marketing efforts to feel fluid, with room for creative adjustments based on frequent collection of new data points. While many factors can lead to ineffective marketing, consistency can be attributed to great marketing.

Marketing isn’t black and white. There isn’t one strategy that works for every brand, nor is there one plan that produces the exact same results for every industry. Marketing is an uncertain science that requires testing, review, and optimization to improve its effectiveness -- which is why marketing analytics are so important to review, interpret and use to make adjustments to your strategy, messaging, and tactics.

There’s a lot of marketing advice that tells you what to do to succeed. There are endless lists of things you can do to improve your strategies and boost your marketing effectiveness. But, you can still struggle to succeed even while following all the best marketing advice. Here are a few things that will cause you to fail at marketing.

A marketing strategy is like a living, breathing entity. It’s continually changing and adjusting to the environment. It needs room to grow and evolve, and it can’t do that if you just set it and forget it. When you ignore your marketing strategy, it can quickly grow stale. Changes in customers, demand, markets, competitors, and culture happen. If your marketing stays the same during these external changes, it can become outdated, out-of-touch, and ineffective.

Marketing is not a static process that you can set and forget. While it would be nice if you could design one marketing strategy with tactics that you put on autopilot for months to come, that is not the case. With the need for agility and resiliency, marketing is a creative and challenging industry and arguably why marketing roles are some of the most critical in business.