Every good marketer knows you can’t effectively market a product or service without a plan. But, before you execute a marketing plan, you must create a marketing strategy.
According to HubSpot, “A marketing strategy outlines the long-term goals and overall approach, while a marketing plan covers the specific actions and tactics to achieve those goals.”
Marketing leaders who attempt to promote their product or service without a strategy risk losing time, money, and resources. Marketers who document their marketing strategy are 331% more likely to report success than those who fail to document one.
In this article, we cover five tips for creating a marketing strategy, so you can turn people who’ve never heard of your business before into loyal and repeat customers.
1. Define Marketing Goals
Every campaign needs marketing goals to measure the impact of the work. Goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) will produce the most success. It’s natural for goals to develop and change as time passes and you become more aware of what makes your target audience tick or as market trends alter.
Examples of marketing goals are:
- Gain new customers
- Boost brand engagement
- Increase brand awareness
- Strengthen industry authority
2. Know Your Target Audience
A main part of creating a marketing strategy is knowing your target audience, or a group of people that share similar demographics, interests and buying history. The more you know about your target audience the better you can create a marketing strategy and plan that speaks to the needs of the consumers.
Specific things to identify about your target audience are location, age, gender, income, and employment. Identifying their pain point and how your brand will help is also part of the target audience information.
Think of a popular meal delivery service that provides pre-measured ingredients and recipe cards. These brands may have completed target audience research to find their customer base is adults ages 25-40 who are mostly female with an average income. They want to make healthy meals at home but don’t have time to plan or grocery shop. From this information, marketers can strategically move forward to create campaigns that will target this specific population.
3. Create A Marketing Budget
Brands who understand the necessity to invest in software, advertising, creating content, and hiring the right people, will see a higher return on their marketing efforts. Creating a marketing budget is essential for the scrappy one-person marketing team and the multi-million dollar company marketing teams.
If marketers don’t know where to allocate funds (or how much), then your marketing strategy will suffer. A budget helps guide spending capabilities, so you can focus on other important aspects of strategy. You may allocate part of your budget toward researching competitors and market trends of your product or service.
4. Research the Competition
The marketer’s job is to understand your customers better than anyone else and that includes competition. If you market a product or service without researching the competition, then you risk losing out on market share.
When you perform competitive analysis you can learn a competitor’s market position, brand, and value proposition. This information helps marketers differentiate their brand and potentially offer what competitors don’t.
Be aware of the competition, but never blatantly copy their campaigns, branding, or pricing. Consumers are smart and will be able to tell. This could hurt your brand identity and decrease trust among your brand and target audience.
5. Choose Market Channels
If you know your target audience and marketing goals, then choosing marketing channels for your brand will be easier. Digital marketing provides more options for brands to reach their audience than traditional channels ever could. Marketers can decide:
- How to grow their email list
- Which social media platforms to use
- Whether posting content to a company blog is worth it
- If creating and producing a podcast could build brand awareness
Deciding to be everywhere all at once is not an ideal strategy when it comes to marketing. The more you use your target audience knowledge, the better you can reach potential customers with channels.
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