When someone mentions your marketing strategy, do you chuckle as you picture the three Facebook posts you tossed up last year? Or maybe you started an email newsletter in January, but by June it had completely puttered out. These stops and starts are common among small businesses.
You might be surprised to learn that forming a good marketing strategy begins with just four questions. It will shape all of your activities and give your strategy a direction. Here are the four initial questions:
Who Do You Love? You’re identifying your best customers. These are your high-profit margin, easy and loyal customers that make you smile when you answer the phone and hear their voice on the other end. It’s the customer that pays their invoice on time, doesn’t ask for special accommodations and says “it’s worth it” when you are forced to implement a price increase. You know the ones.
What do these customers look like? Do they tend to fit any parameters? Compile a list of your best customers and determine a buyer persona for each major category.
Where Does Your Audience Hang Out? Once you’ve determined a few identifiers, you have to figure out where these people spend their time. From live events to social media, you need to know where they connect. And don’t make assumptions based on what you like or where you’d prefer your ideal customers to spend their time. If it’s TikTok, you better learn to love TikTok.
What Gets On Their Nerves? And don’t just name the big ones, like long delivery times. Think of the little annoyances, too. Small things like an easy-to-read invoice or a “buy now” button on a social media post may make things easy enough to differentiate between you and a competitor.
You can also think about pain points for generating content. A short how-to video to solve a common problem or a little-known-uses blog post may solve an issue for a potential customer and win them over to your brand.
How Do You Stand Out? There’s a lot of noise on social media. A lot. Your task is to figure out how to be heard.
The answer always boils down to offering value to your audience. Once you’ve identified those pain points, you’re going to use them to improve your audience’s experience. Maybe you offer solutions or show them how to maintain your product to extend its life.
And it’s not always product-related. Adding value may be making a member of your audience laugh so hard they forgot about the dressing down they just got from a boss.
These four questions go a long way toward getting your marketing strategy off to a good start. Want some help thinking through them? That’s why we’re here. Contact SJC Marketing for a jump start on your marketing.