3 Important Areas of Marketing Strategies
2020-05-27
We all know how important it is to build a solid business plan. In fact, you’d (hopefully) never dream of charging into a new business without one. And yet, surprisingly, many of us aren’t putting in nearly the same effort when it comes to building strong marketing strategies.
What’s the point of investing so much time and money into building and creating a new business, only to have no customers?
If you want customers, you’re going to need to actively get out there and find them, and then let them know you exist. The only way to do that is with solid marketing strategies.
According to a study by Smart Insights, 46% of brands don’t have a defined digital marketing strategy yet, and 16% do have a strategy but haven’t put it into effect yet. That means that more than half of the businesses out there aren’t getting the exposure and customers they could be, simply because people don’t even know they exist yet.
When you don’t have a marketing strategy, you run the risk of becoming directionless as a company, wasting money on channels that aren’t bringing you results, and losing out on potential customers to your competitors.
Thankfully, it’s not that hard to come up with your own marketing strategies. Here are the four steps you need in order to create a marketing plan that works for you.
Know Your Target Customer
The first step in building your marketing strategy is to know who it is you’re marketing to. Doing so ensures that your marketing efforts are focused, and as a result, you’ll be getting the return on investment that you’re after.
One common way to go about this is to create a buyer persona. By creating a buyer persona, you can be sure that you’re marketing to people who are actually interested in what you have to offer. Otherwise your marketing strategy is pretty much the equivalent of a man on a box yelling through a megaphone at random people on the street.
Research Your Competitors
No business exists in a vacuum, even if you are the only brand on the market in your own very specific niche. You can be guaranteed that sooner or later, you’re going to find yourself with some competition, and they’re going to have their own ideas about the best way to acquire customers.
This is why it’s important to spend some time doing marketing research on the competition.
Before you get the wrong idea, though, the point of running a competitor analysis is to help you figure out what you can be doing better or different than the rest of the crowd. It’s not so you can replicate their every move, but rather, so you can:
- • Find out what’s working for them and do it better.
- • Or, find untapped opportunities.
Choose Your Channels
There is a wide variety of ways to get your marketing message in front of your prospects, more than ever, in fact. You can go the traditional advertising route and stick ads in newspapers and on billboards, or you can try more modern and ever-evolving tactics like SEO and content marketing. Whatever route you head down, you need to figure out what channels you’ll be using in order to turn your audience into prospects and then into customers.
While it might be tempting to try everything at once and go for a “scattergun” kind of approach, all you’ll be doing is wasting precious resources on channels that aren’t guaranteed to work.