A marketing strategy is a cornerstone of a successful business.
If you’re not marketing your business effectively, your customers don’t know about you. In turn, it will influence your profit and longevity.
Companies like ScanTeam can help you do a proper analysis to ensure an effective marketing strategy.
While many of us spend a lot of time and effort on our business plan, we tend to neglect the marketing plan.
Ignoring the marketing plan is the most significant business mistake you can make, as experts like Alex Lysak already know.
Let’s take a look at how to develop a marketing strategy to ensure that the right customers come to your business.
What is Marketing Strategy?
Your marketing strategy is your long-term plan to make sure that the right customer knows about your business and product or service.
This plan must ensure that you know who the ideal customer is, what they need, and where they are.
Your strategy must also answer how your product or service meets the needs of your customer.
Your marketing strategy should help your business gain a strategic advantage over other companies that offer similar products or services.
All of this might seem daunting if you’re starting, but let’s break it down.
Where to Start with Your Marketing Strategy
It’s easier to start when you break your marketing strategy down in steps.
Most start-ups can’t afford to get big companies to do market research and formulate plans for them.
The marketing strategy steps allow you to look at each aspect in-depth and make it much less daunting to complete.
As the adage goes, you eat an elephant bite by bite. If you use these steps, it will explain how to create a marketing plan and a written explanation of your marketing strategy.
Step 1: Who is your target customer?
You can go beyond asking who your target audience is in the world of the internet and social media.
You can break it down to the perfect customer. Who is it that is going to buy your product or service? What age, gender, and ethnicity are they? Why are they interested? Where will you find this person?
It’s essential to know the answer to these questions so that you can build a focused strategy to target this unique audience.
Otherwise, your plan is like standing on a soapbox shouting at everyone who walks past.
Step 2: Who are your competitors?
Now that you know who the person is that’s going to buy your product, you need to find out who it is that provides the same or similar products.
These businesses will be your competitors. You need to figure out what advantages you have over them.
Your advantage can be a better quality product, better prices, quality customer service, or location.
Make sure you know as much as you can about your competitors and see what you can do better.
Step 3: How will you get your customers to know about your product?
You need to figure out which marketing channels you are going to use to communicate with your customers.
Where will you find them to tell them? Some companies use direct messaging or flyers.
You can consider newspaper or magazine ads, billboards, radio and TV ads. Social media is also an effective way to communicate with some audiences.
You need to choose one or more channels where you can best communicate with your target customer.
A good rule is to have two owned media outlets, using Search Engine Optimization and blogs.
You should then have one media outlet where you have earned trust, and this can be something like a shoutout on YouTube.
You must also have one paid media outlet, which can be pay-per-click or display ads. This is a perfect ratio when you are starting.
Sometimes people assume that if they have a website, that’s a good enough way to communicate with their audience.
This is not true. You still need to tell people about your website to create traffic. Traffic is vital, whether you have an online shop or not. Your website gives essential information to your customers.
Step 4: Get people to buy your product
Every time you have an advertisement, it should follow the AIDA rule. If you are unfamiliar with the practice, AIDA means:
- Attention: Grab the attention of your target audience
- Interest: Create interest in the product
- Desire: Evoke a desire in the customer
- Action: An ad is ineffective if it does not make the customer go over into effect, either visiting your website or your shop.
The channels that you pick to communicate with your customers must be effective. Starting from people who have no idea that you exist, it must go through the AIDA steps to create action.
Step 5: Have SMART marketing goals
The last step is to make sure that you have goals in place for your marketing strategy. Goals must be SMART:
- Specific: you must specify your objective.
- Measurable: you have to be able to measure the target, e.g., monetary measurement.
- Achievable: you must be able to achieve your goals.
- Relevant: the goal must be pertinent to your plan.
- Time-bound: you must have a time-frame for when to meet the goal.
When you set goals, you can keep the SMART principle in mind. A goal can then be growing your email list by 10,000 addresses by the end of the year.
Conclusion
It doesn’t seem daunting to set up when you break the marketing strategy down into manageable steps.
Remember that the marketing plan is of extreme importance for the success of your business.
