A Marketing Strategy Is The First Thing You NeedDo you have a marketing strategy in place? Any army that has gone into a campaign has to have a battle plan.
A marketing strategy covers a businesses overall approach for promoting its brand to your target audience. The process involves research, goal setting, and positioning of your brand.
Before setting up a marketing campaign, you need this.
The D-day landings were being planned months before they tool place on 6th June 1944.
For anyone considering doing any marketing (whether a new company or existing) you need to have a marketing strategy. An objective and a battle plan of how you are going to approach the marketing campaign and achieve success.
Should you charge in like General Custer, chances are you will encounter problems and as such waste money.
The marketing mix is divided into the 4 P’s of marketing:
You can then extrapolate this information into a fully fledged marketing plan for each promotional channel. It is important to lay out the information in broad strokes so that you understand the overall direction of your marketing strategy.
What are you wanting to achieve from your marketing campaign?
Typically it is because you need more business, more leads and more customers giving you more income.
You need to know what your goals are from your marketing campaign, which will help you allocate a suitable budget to your campaign.
Having funds available is essential as to whether your marketing is going to be a success or not.
Marketing will cost more than you think, it is not cheap and there are no short cuts.
There is no point in starting a marketing campaign if you do not have the funds to see it through.
It is important to know who you are competing against, so as to work out why you are different.
Is your product or service better, if not, can you adapt it so that you are better. Do you have a longer history or is your product/service a trailblazer?
You may even find other competitors that you did not know about that are nipping at your heals from behind the scenes.
Segmentation, targeting, and positioning (STP) refers to the process of delivering a more relevant, personalised messages to your target audiences. In other words, rather than publishing content on a whim, you go through a methodical process for creating content that resonates with your target buyer.
This is pretty much always going to be on your website, which is your shop window.
In the digital world, content creation is the only way to draw people onto your website.
It has long been said that ‘content is king’ and search engines love new content, relevant content and compelling content.
Your website content needs to be unique, well written and relevant to your target audience.
Social media is also a useful vehicle to carry your content. Platforms such as Tik Tok are the new battleground for social media influencers, which is a great example of the evolution of marketing.
In order to get a strategy in place, there are a few things that need to be done.
Have a think about what it is that you are looking to do. How you are going to go about it and how long you think it will take
There are different sorts available, each as effective as the other. But all need to be used in the right way. Most of the reasons that marketing campaigns do not work is because they are the wrong sorts of marketing for the job.
A little like using a rifle to storm a castle instead of using a cannon.
Have you spoken to a marketing consultancy business? They are experts in strategy and can advise on how to approach a marketing campaign using the right form of marketing.
There is no harm in asking and usually advise if given for free.
Marketing is not cheap, especially if it is not thought out it can be very expensive. So you need to make every penny count.
By having a marketing budget in place, you can allocate resources in the best way (or the marketing consultancy can help you allocate them appropriately).
Without a clear marketing strategy, you are essentially throwing things into a pond to see what sinks and what floats.
Targeting the right audience is important if you want to get the right results. Targeting everyone is a scattergun approach and is often where a lot of marketing fails.
Market research is an important part of any marketing strategy and one that often gets overlooked.
Understanding your customers and their buying habits is important, as is being flexible to ever changing markets. As fears of forthcoming recessions come and go, there will be ups and downs that need to be adapted to.
There are a number of marketing channels that are available to you.
Certain marketing channels are suited to certain products/services and some are not. Here are a few marketing channels to consider:
Tik Tok is the latest social media platform and can be a very effective marketing channel for many products & services.
One of the other reasons that marketing does not work well, is that the company doing it does not properly understand your sector, the trends or how prospects will respond. As they say, knowledge is power and experience is the key to avoiding rookie mistakes.
Imagine if you have done a direct mailing campaign to 10,000 companies. However the letter was not worded in the correct way, it would get binned and that is that. This comes into the marketing strategy.
There are lots of marketing companies in the UK (tens of thousands actually) so looking at different agencies and comparing ideas and quotes is a very wise move. Marketing prices will vary from agency to agency.
Choosing a marketing agency that has experience, is local and is cost effective is the recipe for it being a successful campaign. A good agency will put together a good marketing strategy, that will produce results!
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