How to Create a Marketing Strategy Guide
At the heart of any successful business is a strong and comprehensive marketing strategy. Marketing strategies help businesses to define goals for their future and outline a detailed plan for accomplishing those goals. Reliable marketing strategies can make a world of difference when it comes to your ability to attract and retain customers. Without a killer marketing strategy, you’ll likely have to work twice as hard to keep half as many customers. If you know how to create strong marketing strategies, your business will thank you. Read on to learn everything you need to know about creating a successful marketing strategy.
Step One: Understand Your Target Audience
By first getting to know your ideal customer, you’ll be able to plan the best ways to reach customers within your target demographic. For example, if your business is marketing to older adults, you likely wouldn’t use influencer marketing tactics on social media platforms targeted at teens and young adults to promote your business services or products.
When working to understand your target audience, you should consider who is most likely to need the services or products your business offers. You should also consider the core drivers of your target audience. A good way to get a strong idea of who your target customers are is by creating a buyer persona. Buyer personas help you to make sure you’re marketing your business to the right people using the right channels and marketing tactics.
A couple of questions you can ask yourself when creating a buyer persona:
- What kind of buying experience is my ideal customer looking for?
- What demographics are in need of the goods or services I am offering?
- Why is my ideal customer purchasing my product?
- Are there any concerns my ideal customer might have about my product?
It can be helpful to use input from existing customers when creating a buyer persona. To get information about your current customers, you can send out surveys or use analytics software to get more data about your existing customers.
Step Two: Get to Know Your Competition
After you understand who you’re marketing to, you need to figure out who else is marketing to the same target audience. Who is offering the same products and services you’re offering to the same target audience? A good way to get to know your competitors is by researching their social media tactics and their website design. Take note of what incentives they offer to customers, what patterns they follow, and what is working well for them. You should also try to figure out what isn’t working for them. Find a place where you can take something your competitors are doing and make it better.
Step Three: Break Down and Improve Your Sales Funnel Strategy
A sales funnel can be seen as the journey that buyers go through as they are introduced to your product, all the way up until they make a purchase and go on to become a repeat customer. At the top of your funnel is your cold leads. Cold leads are unaware of your business and you need to find a way to get your products in front of them. Once they are aware of your business, you’ll need to turn them into hot leads by making them want your products. Once you’ve converted them into hot leads, you’ll then need to get them to take action by making a purchase and becoming a customer.
When creating your marketing strategy, you’ll want to go through each step of your sales funnel and make sure you’re doing all that you can to convert leads into sales. Break down individual tactics you’re using at each level of the sales funnel, see where you can improve, and adjust according to previous experience and research.
Step Four: Set SMART Goals for Your Marketing Strategy
Once you’ve conducted research on your customers and competition, and worked to improve all steps of your sales funnel strategy, set some goals for yourself to make sure your marketing strategy is working. Your goals should be SMART goals:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Actionable
- Retainable
- Timely
Some examples of SMART marketing strategy goals include
- Gain 2,000 new twitter followers by the end of the year.
- Generate 300 qualified leads per month
- Add 5,000 new leads to our mailing list by the end of the quarter.
- Boost our lead to customer conversion rate by 5% by the end of the quarter.
- Improve our customer retention rate by 5% by cross-selling and upselling products.
Building and Executing a Marketing Strategy with Lift Digital Marketing
If you’re ready to make a difference in your business’ marketing efforts, look no further than Lift Digital Marketing. Knowing the basics of how to create a marketing strategy is great, but if you want to kick start the marketing for your business and really take it to the next level, working with the experts can do that for you. We’ll work with you to develop and improve your marketing strategy so that you can hit all the goals you set for your business. Contact us today to schedule a consultation.
