7 steps to developing your marketing strategy
1. Know your ideal customer
For your marketing strategy to be effective, you need to know who your ideal customers are. These people will be your target audience – the people who are most likely to purchase your products. It’s best to avoid mistakenly thinking that anyone is your buyer. Instead, focus your efforts on a niche in the market. To identify your ideal customer, you can create a customer avatar. Also known as a buyer persona, a customer avatar is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. Here’s how you can create your customer avatar:
- Do some research: Do in-depth market research to get a good idea of who your ideal customer is, including their thinking, buying patterns and location. If this person is someone who has already visited your business, you can send them a more detailed survey to gain deeper insights.
- Build your avatar: After doing your research, start building your avatar. Create a profile of your customer avatar, including their demographic information, goals and values, where they get their information, challenges and pain points, as well as their potential objections and role in the purchasing process. You can give them a name and attach a stock photo to show what you think they might look like and help you to visualise them.
- Repeat as needed: It’s likely that you will have more than one ideal customer, so you can create avatars to represent your other ideal customers as needed.
Creating a customer avatar can help to make your marketing campaigns more targeted and effective. Identifying the pain points of your ideal customers allows you to find out if your products solve their problems. This can help you get their attention and engage with them better.
2. Decide on your goals
It’s important to be clear about exactly what you would like to achieve with your marketing efforts. Knowing your marketing goals will help you to choose the most effective marketing channels for your business. Potential goals include the following:
- raising brand awareness
- acquiring new customers
- increasing sales
- generating more leads
- engaging more with your audience
- growing inbound website visits.
Make sure that your goals are realistic and measurable and that your business can sustainably achieve them. When it comes to marketing, there is an array of directions you can go in. However, it’s best to avoid taking on too much and instead focus your efforts on the area where they will make the biggest impact. Identify the biggest blocker in your marketing that is preventing your business from growing and focus on that area.
3. Set your budget
Marketing is expensive, so it’s important to set a budget for your strategic marketing plan to ensure that you don’t overspend. When you are developing your marketing budget, make sure that you only spend money on initiatives that will help you to achieve your current goals. Here are the activities that you should include in your marketing budget:
- advertising
- printing promotional materials
- employing staff or engaging freelancers for marketing activities
- search engine optimisation activities
- branding design
- developing and maintaining your website
- donations and sponsorships.
4. Analyse the competition
Perform a competitive analysis to find out how your products and services compare to the competition, as well as how your competitors market their goods. This is a useful exercise because it can help you to identify where your strengths and weaknesses lie. Here’s how to perform a competitive analysis.
- Find businesses that offer similar products and services in your area.
- Determine whether they are direct or secondary competitors.
- Research your competitors. Find out everything you can about their products or services and which marketing tools they use. Check out their digital presence by having a look at their website and social media pages. Pay attention to the content they produce, the language they use to describe their products and what their customers are saying about them.
- Identify the keywords that their website ranks for and where most of their website traffic comes from.
While you’re analysing the competition, it’s also a good idea to look out for businesses that could complement your offering and see if you could start a collaboration with them.
5. Determine your unique selling proposition (USP)
A unique selling point, or USP, is the thing that sets your business apart from the rest – it’s the reason that your customers buy from you and not your competitors. Now that you have identified your competition, it’s time to think about how you will differentiate your business from them. Your USP could be that you offer a better price or product quality than your competitors. Or perhaps your offering is new or unique, or you provide exceptional service. To help you identify your USP, consider the following:
- the special skills and knowledge that you have
- why your customers choose you over the competition
- what you love about your products or services
- how your products or services benefit your customers.
6. Choose your marketing channels
Now it’s time to think about which marketing activities will help you to achieve your goals. The options when it comes to marketing channels seem to be endless these days, and choosing the right ones for your business can be overwhelming. Ultimately, it comes down to your specific audience and your business model. Here are some examples of channels that are often effective for small to medium-sized businesses.
- Cold email marketing: This is a great way to connect with prospective customers who might not be familiar with your business. An example of how cold email marketing works is researching a company that you want to target and sending a personalised email to one of the decision-makers in which you introduce your business and explain why you think their company would benefit from your products or services. Make sure that you monitor your results and adjust your strategy as needed.
- Social media advertising: Posting a paid ad on a social media platform, such as Facebook, can be effective because it allows you to target your specific demographic. Social media advertising is a relatively inexpensive way to reach thousands of customers and potential customers.
- Content marketing: A more budget-friendly alternative to placing paid ads on social media is to post content on your own social media pages. This is known as content marketing. You should aim to post useful, thoughtful content that is in line with your audience’s interests. The aim is for you to establish yourself as an expert in the field and show potential customers that you are a trustworthy business. For example, if you run a restaurant, you might share recipes, cooking tips or information about food safety.
- Referral marketing: This is one of the most trusted and effective marketing tactics for small businesses because it is an inexpensive way to promote word-of-mouth marketing. Referral marketing is where you reward your current customers for recommending your product or service to other people. For example, you could offer a discount to your customer or their friend if they use a particular link or code when purchasing your product or service.
- Event marketing: This involves promoting your brand and products or services at an online or in-person event. You can organise and host the event yourself, be a sponsor or attend as a guest or exhibitor. The event could be anything from a class, conference, trade show or seminar to a pop-up shop, launch party or happy hour event. By engaging and connecting with customers and prospective customers in person, you can establish a stronger bond, which can help to boost your sales, brand trust and brand awareness.
7. Monitor your results and make adjustments
Once you’ve planned and executed your strategic marketing plan, it’s important to make sure you track and review your activities to see if they are helping you to meet your goals, such as increasing sales. If you’re just starting your business, you should ideally review your marketing strategies every three months. Then, when your business is well-established, you can review your strategies whenever you launch a new product, when a new competitor enters the market or when there is an issue that impacts your industry. Some ways to monitor the success of your marketing activities include the following:
- regularly reviewing your sales data, for example, monthly
- tracking customer activity during a marketing campaign
- using free analytics tools to see how effective your social media or website campaigns are.
Take note of which marketing messages and which channels work best, and be prepared to change them if they are not delivering the desired results. For your marketing efforts to be a success, it’s important that you continually monitor the key metrics and make adjustments as you discover more about your target audience, their spending habits and how they consume media.
