Defining a Marketing Strategy for Your Business
With so much competition online and on the street, a strong marketing strategy can help differentiate your business and connect with potential clients. When defining your marketing strategy, keep two things in mind to ensure you propel your business in the right direction:
- Your customers
- Your business objectives
Whatever you formulate for your marketing plan, put it in the context of your customers and your business goals. Keep them in focus as you read on to see how to produce a practical, effective marketing plan.
Identify Your Audience
Naturally, marketing starts with identifying your audience. The primary purpose of marketing is to add value to your product or service and help you connect with the right people. You need to know your ideal customers to do both of these things.
It’s advisable to develop an ideal customer persona. This means building one or more profiles of people most into your brand. A firm typically has various kinds of people that like its products, but normally one or two types stand out.
Research to ensure your marketing caters to them, whether that means appropriate pricing or creating digital content that solves their problems. A free customer persona template can keep your efforts organized.
Segment Your Audience
You can reach out to more people when you know your audience – or the audience you think you want. Use available tools to connect with people you want to market to, as well as potential business partners that can help you market and move your product.
Leadar is an excellent service that can help businesses connect to their target customers. Professionals can use this website to build marketing lists and customized groups for targeted marketing campaigns.
Align Your Marketing and Business Goals
If you don’t have a written statement of your business goals, create one as soon as you’ve finished reading this post. This will help you avoid putting energy into marketing tactics and strategies that don’t serve the big picture.
Suppose your year’s primary business goal is to reach new customers. Putting your marketing energy and budget into maintaining contact with existing customers doesn’t serve the main business goal as effectively as more market research, a Facebook ad campaign, or significant price promotions.
It’s wise to remember that marketing isn’t a maverick department that goes its own way. No matter how big or creative the idea, it must serve the primary business objectives. Otherwise, marketing is like one drawn-out wheel spin: it makes an impressive amount of noise and smoke but doesn’t actually move the vehicle forward.
Outline Your Marketing Budget
This is critical. If somewhat boring to most people. So let’s get it over with.
It’s imperative to put in writing the maximum you wish to spend on marketing and how much you expect to spend.
Going over budget can be a major problem for businesses. It can be tempting to spend more on marketing speculatively, especially with technologies like online ads that ask you to roll the dice to some extent in the hope of getting the predicted returns on investment.
With so many different ways to spend your marketing money, on and offline, you need to be able to take a step back, re-examine your marketing budget, and make a deliberate, considered decision.
If you do decide to go over budget, the extra money needs to come from somewhere, which means your decision will impact other aspects of your business.
Consider the 4Ps
Several versions of the Marketing Mix exist. Sometimes, it focuses on the digital marketing aspect. Sometimes there are 7Ps rather than 4. These 4 Ps – developed by US marketing professor Edmund Jerome McCarthy in 1960 – are the core of a robust marketing strategy. They are worth knowing and thinking about regularly.
- Product – this is the tangible good or intangible service you’re offering to people. Ideally, people need or want it. If not, you’ll be glad you stopped to think about this part of the marketing mix. Marketing decisions about the product include product design, range, branding, packaging, and guarantees.
- Price – this is how much your customer or client pays. When you change the price, it has a direct impact on your business’s revenue and the perceived worth of your firm, so take your pricing strategy, tactics, discounts, and terms very seriously.
- Place – this refers to where you provide your service or where you will sell your product. All your distribution considerations are part of this category, as are decisions about physical locations, inventory, and logistics.
- Promotion – Sometimes, this part of the marketing mix eclipses all the other considerations. It refers to all your marketing communications, including advertising, PR, and content marketing. A great promotional strategy means finding the right balance of elements, being clear about what messages you want to communicate, using the best channels to reach your audience, and not overdoing it. No one likes the hard sell.
Plan Content Creation
Modern marketing usually leans on digital marketing. That typically involves creating web content that will attract audiences. Again, this is why keeping your customers in mind is so important. If you develop content your audience needs and enjoys, they will come to you, saving you postage stamps and megaphones.
Things change fast in digital marketing and how people use the internet, so research quickly and be prepared to pivot. Video content has been hot for a while. Currently, short-form video is searing. Whether you’re taking a few clips of what goes on behind the scenes or you’re providing snippets of interviews with the people that make your brand what it is, do it in a minute or less and your business can connect with busy people that want to consume content quickly and easily.
Online content also includes blog posts, infographics, podcasts, FAQs, cheat sheets, and many other forms with an enduring appeal that can help you inform, entertain, and persuade your audience to become loyal fans.
Conclusion
Make sure to perform your customer and market research using available tools and take the time to get it right. This is the foundation of a well-defined marketing strategy. Align your marketing with your overall business goals and customers’ needs if you want to stop spinning your wheels and start spinning straw into gold.
