You’ve heard that you need a marketing strategy, but you aren’t sure where to start. You might wonder how you’ll even know if it’s successful. If you see business growth, how will you know whether that happened because you started posting on Instagram, or if it’s from the direct mail campaign you do every year?
Here are six clear steps to creating a marketing strategy:
Look in the Mirror. Gather up a team for brainstorming and work through a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis to get a clear idea of who you are, where you stand and what your chances of success could be with the right strategy.
You do You. Working from your SWOT analysis, create a value proposition. This is a clearly-stated message about your strengths and what makes you different from the competition. It’s the baby version of your brand messaging. Be confident about what makes you stand out in your market.
Set Goals. You need to establish what you’re trying to accomplish with your marketing strategy. Create goals that clearly state objectives, with measurable metrics.
Get Cozy with Potential Customers. Your target market shouldn’t be lumped into a single, fuzzily-defined group. If your target is simply, “females between the ages of 20 and 50,” go back and try again. You need a target market, with some defined subgroups and heaps of data about their job roles, hobbies, preferred social platforms and whether they buy into the whole left-versus-right Twix thing.
Create Buyer Personas. If you always had an imaginary friend growing up, you’ll love this step. Drill down your target market until you have a picture of what the typical buyer is in that subgroup. Give them a name, a face and plan to direct your marketing efforts directly to these imaginary people.
Do Some Rubbernecking. It’s time to come up for air and see what’s happening around you in your market. Is there a big trend among your competitors that you’d be crazy to pass up? Maybe you find that your market tends to be dominated by brands all embracing a pastel-and-white, fresh look and it leads you to think that a brand represented in bold colors could really stand out. Just be careful not to be an imitator as a result of this step.
Determine your Content and Channels. This is a huge topic that can hardly be contained in a paragraph, but you need to decide how you’ll reach out to customers, engage them and help them move through the buy cycle. It might be a combination of digital and traditional methods that includes Instagram and direct mail, or you might find that a blog that addresses customer pain points tends to be magic for lead generation. Whatever you do, it’s key to be measuring it and refining it, so that you know whether your marketing strategy is a success.
Now that you’ve got the overview, wouldn’t it be super convenient if there were a team of experts waiting to just knock this out of the park for you? Oh, wait…
We already talked about that, our team at SJC Marketing is ready to help you meet your goals. We know how to execute a marketing strategy and we do it with a level of energy and out-of-the-box creativity that is alternately recognized as genius and insanity. We’ll take it.