Is a Marketing Strategy Just a To Do List?
Despite following strictly every step of the plan, your company is still viable of being on the wrong track and falling off from your goals. Why? Because a marketing strategy does not equate to a series of tasks. Read more
How to Create an Effective B2B Marketing Strategy In 2022
Successful marketing is subjective and will mean different things to different businesses and organizations. In 2022, with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic still likely to be playing on businesses and organizations alike, success is likely to look different.
When it comes to B2B marketing, it is no longer just about generating leads and knowing your audience inside and out. The world of B2B marketing has expanded and grown in order to adapt to this new COVID normal. The behaviors and thought patterns of consumers and professional services buyers alike have changed in order to accommodate for unforeseeable problems.
B2B marketing is customer centric and relies heavily on direct and outbound techniques of communications. However, the way in which consumers consume has changed. The past two years have been pivotal in customer relations and how businesses communicate. Given this, your businesses current B2B marketing strategy is likely to be inefficient and outdated. Read more
The 5 Critical Components of a Leading Marketing Strategy
A marketing strategy is one of the first steps when planning a successful campaign. Overall, the marketing strategy gives your business the opportunity of reaching consumers and turning them into clients of your own product/service. However when planning a marketing strategy, there are multiple components that must be considered. The internal and external components of your business and the market must be explored in order to identify the most successful outcome. Similarly, identifying what makes your business stand out against others, is crucial in establishing a leading strategy. Here are the 5 most critical components when planning your leading marketing strategy.
Why Marketing Strategy Is Fundamental To Marketing Success
What is a marketing strategy?
A marketing strategy is essentially a framework that outlines your company’s long-term direction and marketing objectives – typically leading to an ultimate gain in consumer conversions. It is a comprehensive plan that breaks down the whole process of the customer journey into how to effectively engage the customer at each stage, keeping budget and resources within an appropriate range.
Why are marketing strategies crucial to success?
Marketing strategies do not have to be rigid; they can change into whatever the company deems fit as trends change, consumers profiles change, and business goals change. What is important is that there is a solid framework and vision behind every marketing operation.
Without a marketing strategy, it is easy to lose focus on marketing goals and quantify marketing progress. Without vision, employees may have differing ideas of their company’s objectives. When multiple people try to achieve different things, it’s unsurprising that your company will be unsuccessful. A marketing strategy will increase clarity and help achieve a more cohesive vision.
A marketing strategy with specified goals and outlined activities decreases the chances of overshooting the budget. Consistent and routine marketing is often more successful than sporadically throwing money into different forms of marketing. A concise marketing strategy ensures that your money isn’t being wasted and that the allotted amount is being used efficiently and effectively.
Through setting clear objectives, the most relevant KPIs are chosen to measure performance and provide stepping stones to guide the performance of marketing tactics. Without successful measurement of results, the company lacks learning since valuable consumer data isn’t being properly leveraged nor comprehended by the marketing team.
Marketing strategies can also allow companies to understand their own customers better. Through identifying their product offerings, pricing, and target consumer segment, the company can create a target consumer profile and better service offering. A proactive marketing strategy will see you learn more about the customer and their interactions with your company, identifying issues with your service offering before they are even addressed as critical issues and ultimately assisting in the future development of your business.
How do you make an effective marketing strategy?
Before a company can launch an effective marketing strategy, they need to research their marketing landscape and understand who they are and what they are as a business.
It is important to have a clear idea of:
- Value prepositions (using the 4P’s)
- Competitors
- Strengths and weaknesses, as well as threats and opportunities.
- Your target market and their needs
With these in mind, you can begin developing a marketing strategy.
What are the objectives of your marketing strategy?
Your goals for your marketing strategy are key to achieving your overall business goals. Thereby your marketing goals should be used as a method of achieving your business goals. Perhaps a business goal is to achieve greater market share. Therefore, your marketing strategy would be to expand through greater brand awareness. At this point, it is helpful to follow a SMART goal guideline to ensure you have the greatest chance at achieving your goals.
SMART is an acronym for: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. A specific goal ensures the What? Who? Why? – of a goal is answerable and prevents a goal from being too broad. A measurable goal is crucial to seeing results, allowing for the tracking of progress, consequently allowing you to stay on task. Is the goal achievable? Is it reasonable? Sometimes, biting off more than you can chew can simply be setting yourself up to fail. Ensuring your goal is relevant to your business, and your economic environment ensures only worthwhile and achievable goals are pursued. And finally, time-bound goals that answer where you envision your business in 6 months foster focus and motivation.
1. Scope out the current marketing trends and landscape
Is there a current observable market trend? Trends are opportunities, and by successfully leveraging trends, business growth can be exponential. Perhaps, consumers are more frequently engaging through online transactions due to Covid-19 restrictions, or perhaps there’s a new trend on social media providing huge growth in gardening or baking. Capitalizing on trends and even trying to predict trend directions can prove fruitful since consumers are more likely to engage.
2. Create a customer persona
Ensuring you know who your customers are is pivotal to business success. Developing a profile of your most valuable prospects using demographic data, educated speculations, and consumer profile data is crucial to understanding your customer’s purchasing decisions. One message rarely ever works for everyone, and by creating different marketing approaches through success, target market segmentation will see you obtain overall stronger marketing success.
3. Create measurable goals
KPIs are incredibly important to quantify qualitative results and determining which metrics provide the most insightful and valuable results. Analytics such as leads generated or conversion rate helps you keep track of what your audience most actively engages in and how to shape your future efforts.
4. Specify and outline techniques
Evaluating which digital channels are most appropriate to incorporate into your marketing strategy and whether owned, earned, or paid media is best sets up the marketing strategy for success from day 1. Ensuring that a budget is set and adequate resources are distributed amongst marketing channels is crucial to achieving overall marketing goals. There’s no point exhausting detailed and thorough planning with a poorly funded and executed plan. The ‘how’ is equally as important as the ‘why’ ‘who,’ and ‘when.’
5. Reflection and evaluation
You’ve now mastered your marketing strategy and implementation. However, it’s not time to kick back and relax. Analyzing the results of your strategy is almost as crucial to success as the strategy itself. Valuable data emerges from both success and failure, but data is simply a number in a spreadsheet that provides no future improvements without analysis. A successful business is always learning. It’s a non-stop cycle that is vital to keeping a competitive edge.
Marketing Consulting Firms
The marketing strategy was never said to be easy work, but it is necessary to set up your marketing department for early success. Thankfully, there are many expert marketing consulting firms out there to help businesses like yours achieve their goals. Robotic Marketer utilizes data-driven marketing strategies to ensure that your strategy can be smarter, more intuitive, and more sustainable to achieve success. These companies are out there to tap into your business’s potential and help more consumers realize how amazing your product truly is.
How To Set Marketing Goals And Keep Them
Source: Marketing Eye Australia
There is not a business on the planet that hasn’t thought about setting marketing goals for 2021, and at least given thought to how they are going to keep them. Most companies spend November and December bringing together key stakeholders in a business to discuss the next years business, sales and marketing goals. They do this in the form of a series of workshops, and what’s really great about this, is even if you have a small business, a mini-workshop is invaluable for brainstorming how your business can do better in the year ahead.
Workshops are a great way to reinvigorate your team members and engage with them in taking ownership of your company direction. When you have key stakeholders that benefit from the outcomes of marketing at a marketing workshop, you will find that these members of your team will actively participate in following through on key actions that derive from the meeting.When it comes to having marketing goals in a business, it’s important to:
- Make your goals realistic: If you are seeking to double your business, but spend no extra resources and funds on marketing, then this would be highly unrealistic. Look into your industry average for growth rates and work out what investment your business is able to do in marketing, then ascertain what is a fair growth rate that is achievable but at the same time pushes your team to excel.
- Put a marketing plan in place: By documenting your marketing plan and goals, you will be 313% more likely to experience success according to Coschedule’s recent survey. It’s easy to put together a marketing plan either by using a technology like Robotic Marketer or by just writing it down yourself.
- Put your plan in a project management software: It’s great to have goals and a marketing plan, but without putting together an implementation plan, it probably won’t happen. Ensure that you have a weekly cadence for marketing activities in place, key stakeholders responsible for the delivery of marketing and the right support infrastructure in place.
- Set KPI’s: If your goals are year-on-year, then you need to set in place either monthly or quarterly KPI’s so that if you are not edging towards your goal at the required pace, you can adapt your strategy and make relevant changes.
- Celebrate: If your team helps the company reach it’s marketing goals, then everyone should celebrate the win. Set in place upfront how the team will celebrate so that everyone can work towards the achievement.
In my experience in marketing, it is important to regularly remind everyone on the team of the goals that are in place and how performance is measured. It’s also important to continually reinforce the success of little wins along the way bringing the whole team with you.
Marketing can be fun but it’s also work and repetitive in many ways. Adhoc marketing doesn’t work, and for those who continually set marketing goals and then stray from the marketing plan when a bright new idea arises, you will find that goals are harder to achieve.
Make them easy. Set a plan in place, a way to deliver on that plan and measure your performance along the way.
Source: Marketing Eye Australia