Marketing Strategy
Whether you’re a small business owner trying to reach local customers or part of a large marketing team endeavoring to further global aims, getting your products and/or services in front of customers is a perpetual challenge all brands face. And, as with most things in life, it is a challenge best tackled with a strategy in place.
A thoughtful, dynamic marketing strategy is the backbone of successful all marketing efforts. It lays the foundation of your marketing goals, activities, and milestone by mapping out a gameplan for turning prospects into customers and tactics into conversions. It communicates what you have to offer, who you’re offering to, and what might stand in your way. And it ties the big picture of your brand’s vision to the tactics you employ.
The Essence of a Marketing Strategy
Though Yogi Berra was a baseball catcher, he may well have been talking about marketing when he said “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.” Efforts toward an essential goal prove to be more successful when a strong marketing strategy guides the way. A marketing strategy distills a brand’s value proposition – the easy-to-understand reason why a customer should buy a product – and considers who would most benefit from what it has to offer.
So how do we get to the heart of a brand’s marketing strategy? It starts with some questions.
What’s your company’s current marketing reality? What do you want to accomplish? And how do you get there?
When we know what a brand has to offer and who would benefit from it, we can better outline goals, consider buyer personas, identify competitors and articulate value. Spending time identifying these essential elements are the building blocks for a strong foundation. While decorating a house is fun, solidifying the structure is essential. Marketing strategy is much the same way. By first developing a framework from which to operate, a brand can implement tactics that will move the needle toward overall goals.
Creating a Marketing Strategy
Whether marketing to other businesses (B2B) or directly to consumers (B2C) the basic process for developing your marketing strategy is much the same. While each situation may dictate variation, a solid strategy typically includes a value proposition, goals and objectives, market analysis, customer profiles, and a mechanism for evaluation.
Establish goals and objectives.
It all starts with a goal. But to be successful should be followed up by objectives – specific, measurable outcomes that can be completed in a specific timeframe. For example, to increase revenue by X in Y years.
Understand the marketplace.
To know how to achieve your goals and objectives, it’s essential to have a clear picture of the market landscape. What competitors are out there? What’s going on in the industry? Are there gaps in the market? Research is key and the resulting knowledge is power.
Develop buyer personas.
Who is the ideal customer? You have to know them to reach them. Building general, fictional profiles of an ideal customer based on data and research helps not just identify the target market but builds a level of understanding that allows a brand to make decisions with the customer in mind. What’s more, putting a face on the ideal customer humanizes the process and allows a brand to communicate authentically and personally, often resulting in better leads, higher conversions, and stronger retention.
Our Approach to Marketing Strategy
We get it, resources are finite. There are only so many hours in a day and so many marketing dollars in a budget. We believe strongly in laying the essential groundwork because we’ve found all other marketing efforts are more successful when a thoughtful, robust strategy is the cornerstone of our work.
We rely on a marketing strategy as a constant reference when working with clients on all sorts of projects in all manner of industries. A clear value proposition allows for precise, consistent messaging. A pinpointed target audience enables us to select tactics that will get right in front of them. That, in turn, helps us spend money in the right places. Clear goals and objectives help us measure impact.
Our work leads to results because our solutions are built on sound research, quantitative data, and proven methods. After all, it’s easiest to move forward when you’re not constantly reinventing the wheel.
Take your marketing to the next level.
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