When running your business venture, you’ll need to have a marketing strategy. No matter what stage of your business’s lifecycle, you will always want to invest in marketing. This marketing strategy will allow you to reach new customers and enable you to grow your business.
Without a marketing strategy, you may struggle to build a solid customer base. You may also struggle to compete against other businesses in the same sector as you. Now, with this in mind, what should your marketing strategy cover, and what must it include?
Begin to Set Goals and Targets
As you start to work on a strategy, you must think about what goals and targets you want to set, and what you want to achieve with marketing. For example, are you looking use marketing to launch a new arm of your business? Or are you looking to expand your current customer base? When you have goals and targets in place, you have something to work towards, and you have something that you can visualize.
If you do not have targets and goals, you may find that your marketing efforts are never as successful as they should be. When you are setting your goals and targets, always make sure they are attainable and achievable. If they are not realistic, you will put yourself and your business under unnecessary stress and pressure.
Work Out a Realistic Budget
After establishing goals and targets for your marketing, you’ll then have to look at setting a realistic budget. If you don’t have a set budget for your marketing efforts, you’ll find that you will be investing a lot of money and never seeing any results.
To work out a realistic marketing budget, you’ll need to think about what type of marketing you want to focus on, and the duration. Always think about value for money when considering your return on investment or ROI. You may find that campaigns are cheaper in the short term, but will they give you the longevity you need for marketing and branding? Will they give you results you can work with?
Understand Your Customers
When creating a marketing strategy, it can be easy to lose sight of your customers and what they need. When you do this, you may find that your marketing efforts are not as focused or targeted as you would like them to be. Thinking about your customers first, understanding what they want, and building your marketing around them will be crucial to your marketing success. Undertake primary research and utilize secondary research to find out what marketing channels and platforms your customers respond best to. Find out if they read marketing emails, or establish if they prefer to be contacted through social media. When you build a stronger customer profile, you can then utilize this for all future marketing efforts and strategies.
Reach Out to Marketing Agencies
Undertaking marketing by yourself, or even utilizing in-house sources may not be as productive or effective as you initially think. Reaching out to marketing agencies may be the best option for you and for your business. Marketing agencies will have experience and knowledge that they can inject into your marketing campaigns.
As you need great results from your marketing, you’ll need to reach out to professionals as soon as possible. Look at marketing agencies such as Logical Media Group as soon as you can because you’ll want to get the best on board to ensure you get results.
When reaching out to marketing agencies, look at previous brands and businesses they’ve worked with. See how successful the campaigns were, and look at what they can offer you. Having good, if not great communication with an agency is essential, so focus on building relationships and rapport.
Check Out Your Competitors
To understand what marketing strategies will work for your business, you may find it beneficial to look at what your competitors are doing. Seeing what campaigns they have undertaken in the past will let you to see what target audiences and customers expect. It will also allow you to save time and money as you won’t need to focus on the campaigns or strategies that weren’t so successful for your competitors.
You can find out about what your competitors have done previously by checking out their social media profiles. Seeing what they have posted and looking at the reach they got will be crucial to your future efforts.
When you check out the marketing they’ve done, you start to form a competitor analysis. This analysis will help you to see where and what you need to invest in. If you don’t know or understand your competitors, you may find that you underestimate them, which could be a costly mistake to make.
Have a Timescale Ready to Go
As you progress with your marketing strategy, you’ll see the importance of timing. If your marketing efforts are not well-timed or carefully executed, you’ll find that they won’t have the impact that you want them to. This can then of course have a knock-on effect on your business goals and your marketing objectives.
Carefully looking at when to time your marketing efforts, and creating a timescale/timeline and schedule will help you to get great results. For example, knowing when to release a new campaign can be the difference between success and failure. Planning out at least six to twelve months in advance can be ideal, but sometimes it’s not always realistic. So, as you begin to build a marketing strategy, look at planning every quarter and then go from there.
Monitor Your Efforts and Impact
Even though you may be utilizing marketing professionals, you’re still going to want to monitor the impact and effort all marketing may have. This monitoring can allow you to see what marketing methods and channels provided you with a great ROI, and what failed miserably.
When you can monitor what you’re doing and what has been done, you can better plan and prepare for the next quarter. If you’re not monitoring your efforts, you’re going to find that you’re just guessing what has worked and been successful and what has not.