What is a marketing strategy?
A marketing strategy is a document that serves as a guideline or blueprint that plans how you will reach your prospective customers. Introducing a marketing strategy will allow you to create consistency across different platforms, cut down on costs, and ensure that your marketing efforts are effective and not going to waste. Examples of different marketing strategies that may be relevant to what your business would like to achieve, includes:
Creating brand awareness
Educating your target audience
Building loyalty, credibility and reliability with your potential customers
Generating new demand and business leads
What are the benefits of having a marketing strategy?
Provides you with a better understanding of your target audience
Narrowing down who your target audience is, allows you to determine what challenges they face. This provides you with a better understanding of how to cater your marketing efforts specifically towards your potential customers in order to meet their needs and increase the possibility of selling your goods or services to them.
Accurate buyer personas are a great tool to incorporate into your strategy because they allow you to create a fictional yet ideal customer that would potentially be interested in your products and services. Summarizing your target audience into one ideal persona, teaches you how to communicate with them and improves your ability to accurately sell to them.
Resources are better allocated
Not having a clear idea of who your target audience is, can influence many other aspects of your business. Incorrect allocation of resources is one of the biggest sections influenced by this. Unclear identification of your target audience means that there is no accurate research available related to the channels and methods that will be most effective for your audience. This very easily leads to resources and funds being wasted on campaigns, designs, and so much more while not targeting your potential customers and being ineffective.
Consistent and relevant content
Potential customers are constantly overwhelmed by the amount of brands and information that they consume daily. This means that it is very easy for your brand to get lost in the oversaturated sea of businesses trying to differentiate themselves from the rest. Having a clear plan set out regarding tone, design, fonts etc. ensures that your content is consistent across all platforms. Not only does this come off as more professional but allows potential users to very easily identify your business among the masses of information that bombards them daily.
Precise measurements of ROI
Setting clear goals within your marketing strategy provides you with a baseline to measure your return on investment from any of your marketing efforts. Setting goals for your marketing strategy streamlines your process and allows you to focus on specific activities in order to get the best possible results. Not only this, but having physical, written goals holds you accountable and urges you to achieve the goals that you have determined and commits you to delivering those results.
Being able to follow through with your marketing activities based on the goals that you have set provides your business with the results needed to see whether those strategies implemented were successful or whether you need to change tactics and focus on something else.
