What is Marketing Strategy?
As a business owner, you would always want more success.
But making a brand visible and strategically positioning the brand is not an easy task.
Unless you have an effective Marketing Strategy.
Effective marketing strategies take into consideration all aspects of the marketing flow. From finding the right marketing channel to defining a marketing budget and much more; a marketing strategy works well when you take a holistic approach.
In this blog post, you’ll learn how to develop a winning marketing strategy.
Let’s dive in.
Overview
- Start with Market Research
- Analyze the Competition
- Define Your Target Market
- Brand Positioning
- Develop Your Brand Voice
- How to Evaluate Your Marketing Success
- Final Thoughts
Start with Market Research
Would you create and launch a product without studying the demand in the marketplace? No right? In the same way, your marketing strategy should be based on data and not assumptions. Your market research data does not have to be exhaustive but you need to capture the data accurately to understand the market.
Effective market research can broadly be categorized into Qualitative and Quantitative research.
In qualitative research, you begin by finding out what your potential consumers want and “why” they would need your product. If your potential consumers are mostly offline, you could create focus groups or interview consumers to find out what they are looking for. If you are selling something online, you could conduct surveys or use behavior analytics tools, to know what they are looking for. Social media, industry-specific forums and other online communities are also places to scout what your audience needs.
Quantitative market provides data around the questions “what, who, how much, and how many”. Again, surveys are the best way to conduct quantitative market research. Be survey to target people who would qualify as your potential customers but try not to narrow down the list.
Analyze the Competition
Focus on the 4Ps of marketing mix while performing a competitor analysis. The four P’s of marketing mix are: product, place, promotion, and price. It is crucial to find out who your competitors are, the competitor’s history, location, company size, what they sell and their target audience and how are they positioning. Understanding your competitor’s marketing channels and communication strategies and performing a SWOT analysis will help you understand how you could position yourself. You could create a competition grid to compare and contrast your competitors.
Define Your Target Market
Your next step would be in identifying every segment of audience who would resonate with your marketing whether they buy the products or don’t. Targeting everyone is just like shooting in the air without an aim. A target market is a segment of customers within a selected demographic who are identified as the most likely buyers of your product. Knowing your ideal target segments includes identifying those where you can make the most money given the resources available. Also do bear in mind the possible influencers within the demographic who could be influential in your marketing. When you redefine your strategy, you’ll have to also consider the trade-offs, which is that some current customers will inevitably leave for competitors.
The following are some questions to ask when defining the target market:
- What are the characteristics of your target demographic? Eg., age group, location, gender etc.,
- What are their behaviors?
- What are their interests?
- What are their purchase behaviors?
- How do they make purchase decisions?
- How much do they earn?
- What is the best way to communicate with the target market?
- What are their challenges?
- How can your product or service help them with the challenges?
- Why would they choose not to purchase? What are the objections?
Brand Positioning
Next comes identifying how you want your target market to perceive your brand. Deciding on brand positioning involves identifying how you want to be remembered by your potential customers. It also involves identifying the unique qualities that would differentiate your brand from competitors. For example: the brand positioning of McDonalds is to be perceived as low-priced, quality burgers delivered quickly.
The power of brand positioning lies in communicating how you want to be perceived, consistently throughout all marketing channels. If you fail to do this, you could seldom find success as your marketing message will not stand distinctive. To decide on brand positioning you need to take into account the three aspects of positioning namely; Company, Customers and Competitors. By putting all the data that you’ve arrived at in the previous steps, you now need to come up with messages that are clear, relevant, unique, achievable, and sustainable. While this process may seem simple, you need to brainstorm a lot of ideas to get a clear positioning message. If you target multiple segments, your target audience may have different behaviors and needs. Hence, you’ll need to define a separate brand positioning strategy for each target segment to make sure that you appeal to them.
Develop Your Brand Voice
Now that you’ve decided on how to position your brand in the market, it is time to define the foundations on which your brand will be built. The most typical brand code is the logo and visual elements. Your brand code should be unique, distinctive and memorable. When it comes to defining your brand voice there is no limit to your creativity. Make sure to create a brand voice document and share it with your teams so the underlying message and visuals stay consistent at all times. It is a good idea to revisit your brand voice document and pivot accordingly as your business grows.
How to Evaluate Your Marketing Success
Measuring anything is the key to improving any process. The following are the most common Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that you should measure for your campaigns, irrespective of the marketing type, channel or medium:
Return on Investment (ROI)
Well, this is obvious. Return on Investment measures the sales revenue generated as a result of a marketing campaign. This is the most crucial KPI to measure the effectiveness of any marketing campaign. Tracking ROI will also give you insights on the quality of leads that you have received for a campaign.
Cost per Sale
Cost per Win (or) Cost per Sale measures the expense of each sale. Tracking this metric will help you in identifying and taking steps to reduce costs to increase profit and optimize productivity.
Cost per Lead
A lead is someone who has expressed interest in your product or service either by subscribing to a free trial or filling an enquiry form or some other way. Cost per Lead metric shows how cost-effective your marketing campaigns are in generating new leads.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that complete the desired action. To improve your conversion rate, it is important to optimize your site for conversion by A/B testing, using high-quality images, strong call-to-action buttons and so on.
Customer Lifetime Value
Customer Lifetime Value is the average sale per customer multiplied by the average number of purchases by a customer per year and the average retention years of a customer. This data will help you measure customer retention metrics and on how to devise marketing strategies to target your best customers.
Final Thoughts
Creating a viable marketing strategy is crucial for long-term success. Having a reliable partner to support you on your marketing efforts is paramount. At SolutionChamps, we have years of experience in digital marketing and offline marketing. Let’s get in touch to discuss your marketing goals and elevate your business.
