What is a Good Marketing Strategy for businesses?
If you don’t have a marketing strategy, you’ll have no way of knowing whether your marketing actions have any impact at all. By contrast, a good marketing strategy delivers results – simple as that. It defines the resources required for success, works to definable goals, and has ways of measuring and demonstrating whether they have been achieved. What is a good marketing strategy? Read on for the Outsource Your Marketing 7 step guide.
1. What is a Marketing Strategy?
A good marketing strategy is one that matches appropriate marketing tactics to measurable marketing goals. It’s the tool that helps your business to identify clearly and realistically what your marketing goals should be, and how they can be measured.
Your marketing strategy is made up of 5 sections:
- Products and Services – what do you do?
- Market Position – how do customers see your business in relation to your competitors?
- Customer Profiles – who buys from your business?
- Marketing Tactics – what are the best marketing tools for your business to employ?
- Marketing Planning – what are your marketing goals, how will you achieve them, and how will you measure success?
Your marketing strategy document is a carefully researched resource. It provides all the information you need to decide what your marketing opportunities/goals are.
2. Identifying Your Business Goals
The hallmark of an effective marketing plan is the way in which it is linked to your business goals. These will be different for each business, and will be contingent on the size, age, aspirations, and location of each business. Examples include:
- Reaching a new demographic – perhaps you want your product to reach younger consumers.
- Introducing a new product range – this may be a complementary offering, or a new direction for the business.
- Extending awareness of your products and services – you may be looking to extend awareness to a new region, or country.
You may have just one business goal, or a number of them. Your marketing strategy needs to address each of the goals as part of your research.
3. Market Research
Knowing your market is key to understanding your role within it. The information you need relates to its size, annual growth, social trends, and demographics – age, gender and family type.
If your business is small and local, your market research will most likely take the form of surveys, interviews, and conversations with customers. If, however, you’re entering a larger, more established market, you’ll find more analysis and research online that can help you to understand the larger trends.
4. Profiling Your Customers
Your market research should help you to answer the following questions:
- Who are your customers? – what is their age, gender, profession etc?
- Why do they need your product/service? – what problem/s does your product solve for your customers? What need does it answer?
- How do your customers buy? – online, in person?
- Where do your customers buy? – what’s most important to them? Branding, personal service, authenticity, green credentials etc?
- What do they buy? – is there a particular product range that sells well/poorly?
5. Competitor Profiling
An effective marketing strategy is based as much on a clear analysis of your competitors as it is upon an understanding of your own business. Take time to identify your competitors’ product range, pricing, supply chains and marketing tactics.
Once you know this, you’re in an excellent position to define what sets your business apart from them. You may be able to identify a niche market which has not yet been tapped. You should also take the opportunity to identify ways your business needs to improve in order to achieve a competitive edge.
6. Develop Appropriate Marketing Tactics
It’s tempting to try and do everything – social media, email, PPC, SEO, leafleting etc. A marketing strategy helps you to avoid that temptation. For each of your marketing goals, you should create a list of appropriate marketing tactics, for example:
- Extending awareness of your products to a new region
- Geographic SEO (blogs, landing pages)
- Targeted PPC
- Appropriate social media account
This clearly defined list can be broken down further into specific tasks and activities which will reveal the resources required over a set period. For a more comprehensive list of digital marketing strategies, click here.
7. How Will You Measure Success?
A good marketing strategy provides the opportunity for regular reporting on its success and failures. This allows for the tactics to be adapted in order to better meet the overall business goals.
Each tactic listed should also include a measure for success. It could be more followers on social media, an increase in traffic to the website, or engagement from people in your target region or demographic. These results can be accessed via Google Analytics, or the stats attached to your social media account.
About Outsource Your Marketing
Short on marketing resources? That’s what we’re here for. Outsource Your Marketing is a team of marketing professionals who can provide the expertise you’re looking for. Whether you need advertising copy for a PPC campaign, a website refresh, or the development from scratch of a marketing strategy, we can help.
