All businesses tend to have one major goal in mind: growth. Growing their business by expanding their client base, reaching as many consumers as possible, and building their internal support staff.
But how do you grow in a society where there are thousands of companies all competing for the same goal?
Well, this is where your marketing strategy comes in!
Your marketing strategy is what will make your company unique and set you apart from the competition. Your strategy is how you choose to present your company to the public, and is the game plan you lay out for your marketing department.
Determine Your Target Audience
You can’t begin to plan your strategy until you know who you’re planning this content for. So ask yourself, who is your company’s target audience? This shouldn’t be a simple answer.
How old are your consumers? What are their genders? Where do they live? How much money do they have? These questions, and many more, will help you determine who you are marketing to.
Determining your target audience will allow you to create content that will resonate with the people who will actually buy your product or service. Helping you save money in marketing costs, and profit from lead capture.
Determine Your Channels
Once you know who you’re marketing to, you can determine the best channels to reach them.
There are many channels that marketers can use in today’s society. The two most commons types of channels are digital (social media accounts, websites, email, and apps) and print (newspapers, brochures, flyers, billboards, and magazines.)
In your marketing strategy you should clearly state what channels are going to be used by your company. This will involve a heavy analysis of your company’s target audience, what exactly your product or service is, and your financial standing.
Will you reach more customers through digital or print media? Print ads and paid ad campaigns on social sites can cost a lot of money, but posting content on your website, social accounts, and emails to clients won’t create any additional costs.
So, what would work for your agency? Odds are, probably a unique combination of digital and print, and paid and non-paid content.
Determine Your Objectives
Before you can create your strategy, you need to determine what the end goal of your team’s efforts are. Your marketing team will then create their strategy with these goals in mind.
When creating these goals, it’s important to make them SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-sensitive. SMART goals will not only help you set goals, but set achievable goals for your company.
Your marketing goals can be anything from gaining 100 new Twitter followers by the end of the year, to bringing in 500 new inbound leads by the end of the quarter. All of these goals should be specific to what is going to benefit your company. The marketing team will then begin to plan content that will achieve these goals..
Create Content, And Then Create More Content
Every marketing person knows the saying, “Content is king.” Whether you’re a B2B company, or an Instagram influencer, content is one of the strongest weapons in your marketing toolbox. This is what your team will create to reach your goals, to fit your channels, and to appeal to your target audience.
You may think that creating one solid piece of content is enough to get you by on all of your channels, but that isn’t true.
Your content should be differentiated for each channel you may use. If you’re using social media to reach your younger demographic, that copy should not be the same as the print ads placed to reach older demographics.
A key point to note when creating content, your business is only as strong as your brand. So while your content may shift depending on the marketing material or channel it”s in, it should always maintain the key aspects of your brand.
Creating a content calendar
Create a content calendar to keep you on track each month. This gives your team deadlines and a clear direction of what their short term goals are. You should remember however, that everything doesn’t always go as planned.
Maybe an announcement gets moved back, or a pandemic strikes, so the content you planned last month may not fit anymore. Always create backup content and be adaptable to the ever changing world around us.
Now that you’ve determined who your audience is, what channels you need to use, what your goals are, and have content ready to go, it’s time to put your marketing strategy to the test! And we really mean, to the test.
After implementing your strategy, reflect back on its progress after a month, a quarter, a year. Evaluate how well each channel you chose helped your sales. Gauge your original target audience demographics, were you right, or has it changed?
This reflection is arguably one of the most important aspects of your marketing strategy; viewing real time data will help you to improve your marketing efforts and increase revenue for your company.
