Marketing Strategy tips. A quick read for your coffee break
Every time you speak to someone about your business, your friends and family, you are involved in marketing: whether you like it or not. The same goes for anyone working in your business, whatever their role. So creating a Marketing Strategy is essential in ensuring you’re all using the same language.
Any conversation about your company is an opportunity to promote what your business does, build understanding of how you help clients, increase awareness and that all leads to increasing sales.
We all know that planning and targets help us focus, this is what your Marketing Strategy will do. It will identify who your different target customers are, the ways you can engage with them and what activities are needed to create the most leads and sales for your business.
Let’s face it, without customers, you don’t have a business. Your strategy will help you understand how you match the needs, wants and pain points of your prospective customers with your company’s products and services.
Understand and define your target customers
This might seem obvious, but so many companies do not understand clearly enough who they are targeting: who they want to sell too. A successful marketing strategy and supporting plan means you need a comprehensive understanding of who your target customers are. Neil Patel’s 5 Techniques to Help You Truly Understand Your Customers will give you some great pointers. You need to understand how to persuade them to buy from you rather than your competitors.
who are your target audience?
Develop a simple paragraph or series of statements that describe your target audience in terms of demographics, age, sex, earnings location, lifestyle. Are they innovative or conservative? What other attributes do they have? You might need to define your target audience based on their type of business, job title, function, size of business, budget holder or decision maker. It’s all relevant in terms of building the picture about who you want to sell too.
Market Research and segmentation
Market research will give you greater understanding and insight about your market, your competitors, your products and services. This will help inform your decisions and choices about where you should focus your efforts for greatest returns. Read a little more about market research from Marketing Donut.
Your market research will help you build a comprehensive picture of your market opportunities. It will help you to understand where you will find your prospective customers, which segments of the market you should be targeting and how you reach them: your market penetration and segmentation. You should think about the following:-
- Identifying the market segments
- Develop segment profiles
- Evaluate the attractiveness of each segment
- Prioritise the segments you want to target first
- Identify how you target each of these segments
Understand your USP and your differentiators
So its important to understand what makes your business, your products and your services unique. How do you differentiate them to your competitors; think about your real and perceived competitors. Its easy to think you are truly unique, but its rare to achieve this, but you probably have an edge in terms of product attributes, service delivery, approach and so on. Think about how you differentiate yourself from your competitors and now articulate it. If you can’t explain it, how can you expect potential customers to understand. Your USP is a key component of your Marketing Strategy.
Read these articles on differentiation and how to develop your USP.
Marketing Ideas
Other areas to consider in your marketing strategy
Growth Hacking
An approach very popular with start-up businesses and companies with tight marketing budgets. Growth hacking combined creativity with analytics, social behaviour and digital metrics to increase exposure and increase sales. Read this detailed overview from Weidert
Social media marketing
Social media focuses on delivering valuable content across your social networks to increase visibility of your brand and engage with your target audience. Think about being seen in the right places by your target audience. Social media shares content of all kinds from videos to white papers, blogs to infographics. They’re all designed to influence and attract attention using networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Pinterest and networks like Google and Bing.
Affiliate marketing strategy
Affiliate marketing is an extension of the channels you can use to reach your target audience. This is a type of performance based marketing which rewards one or more affiliate for each customer brought by the affiliate’s efforts. Neil Patel provides an easy understanding of how affiliate marketing works
Build your marketing plan
Once you have a good understanding of your market, your target audience, your USP, who your competitors and how you are going to reach your target audience you need to build your plan. Your marketing plan documents how you will put your strategy in to action; how you will execute your strategy. You will need to set budgets, targets, deliverables, KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators). You will need to describe the tasks and activities you will be undertaking in order to deliver the desired outcomes for your business. Your selection of PR and media, social media, promotions and advertising, email campaigns, content creation plan, website performance and SEO (search engine optimisation), event participation, webinars, networking and collateral creation. Essentially, everything you need to deliver.
Make sure you regularly measure and review your performance against your targets.
Creating your Marketing Strategy might seem very onerous and time consuming, but its worth taking the time to create and document your strategy and plan. If you need some support in creating your marketing strategy talk to our team at Intelligent Marketing hello@intelligentmarketing.uk.com
