Successful marketing begins with a well-considered, well-advised marketing strategy. A good marketing strategy assists you with defining your vision, mission and business goals. In addition, it outlines the steps which you need to take in order to achieve these goals.
Constructing a strong marketing strategy lies at the very foundation of any flourishing, competitive business. As terms can sometimes get mixed together, let’s firstly clarify what a ‘marketing strategy’ is. This term refers to an organisation’s overall game plan for attracting clients through the process of communicating the benefits of their business in addition to key differentiators.
It’s the big picture of the organisation’s vision which informs the marketing plan. It addresses the vital question: what tactics are you going to use to meet your goals as well as bring your marketing strategy to life? To assists you with building an excellent action plan. You firstly need to ensure that you’ve ticked all boxes when devising the marketing strategy.
Know Your Target Customer
The primary step in building your marketing strategy is to understand who it is that you’re marketing to as well as what their core drivers are. Doing this ensures that your marketing efforts are concentrated and that you’ll benefit by getting the return on investment which you’re after.
One a popular way to go about this is to create a buyer persona. Through creating effective buyer personas, you can be confident that you’re marketing to people who are genuinely interested in what you have to provide. If not, your marketing strategy is pretty much the equivalent of a man on a box shouting through a megaphone at random individuals on the street.
Think about what you’d like your perfect customer to look like. Begin by getting granular and build a list of demographics which your customer falls into. This includes:
- Location,
- Age,
- Gender, and so forth.
But don’t stop there. You’re after a nuanced, in-depth picture of your customers (aim to know them better than they know themselves!)