Marketing is key for any business. It allows you to get your products and services in front of new audiences and encourage your existing audience to buy more products from you and hopefully create some brand loyalty. There are a number of ways that you can market a business and these include traditional paper advertising as well as digital marketing and using your website and social media channels. The best way to ensure that you are using the right marketing methods for your business and your target audience is to work with a Marketing Strategy Consultants like www.reallyhelpfulmarketing.co.uk/specialist-services/marketing-strategy-consultant/ who will take you through a marketing strategy plan.
Here are some of the steps that they will go through with you to create the marketing strategy.
Goals – this means setting some goals that you want to achieve with your marketing. These need to be as specific as possible and could include increasing the number of customers who visit your website by a certain percentage or increasing the sales of a particular product or service.
Analysis – this is where you need to do some market research into your industry. It means looking at your competitors and running a SWOT analysis of your own business. This will help to give you a feel for how you compare to your competitors and whether there are any adjustments that you want to make within your business.
Customers – knowing your customer audience inside and out, makes it much easier for you to market to them. This might mean looking at who your current customers are and looking to see whether there are any commonalities between them.
Products & Services – outlining all of your products and services allow you to see which ones you want to focus on and whether there are any that you now want to remove. This is best done with some financial information behind you as to how each product and service performs in terms of sales and overall profit.
Objectives – this means looking at what you want to achieve from your marketing and links to your larger goals that you defined in the steps above.
Technique – this is looking at what marketing methods you are going to use and will be based on the goals that you want to achieve as well as the buying methods of your customers. Your budget may also play a part in what marketing you do.
Budget – clearly defining what budget you have available for your marketing efforts will give you an idea of what you can afford and how far you can make your budget stretch.
Plan – this is where you develop your actual marketing plan and how you are going to market, when and what you are going to say.
Analysis – this is an important final step where you assess whether you achieved your goals and outcomes and stayed within the budget that you allocated for your marketing.