You know your business goals better than anyone.
Whether it’s the product itself or the day-to-day operations, your business is your baby.
But here’s the catch. There’s probably an area where you’re lacking, and that’s our good friend, MARKETING.
So, what is marketing, and why does your business need one?
Concisely put, marketing is everything. It’s how businesses and consumers “sense” your business, telling customers what, how, and why.
In a more complex definition, marketing involves lots of specialties, processes, and tools that can empower and promote your business.
Marketing a business is a complex roller coaster. Ups and downs. Twists and turns. Does this overly used metaphor resonate with you? You’ve probably heard it time and time again.
The point is – marketing isn’t easy.
And while there’s no marketing trick to rule them all, there are plenty of best practices and strategies to help you rock your business.
Types of Marketing
Your marketing strategies change depending on your target audience and industry. Here are a few types of marketing tactics that are best practices:
Sometimes the quickest way to generate awareness and sales is through advertising. Whether you’re buying a billboard or running pay-per-click ads on Google, consider a variety of marketing channels.
Digital Marketing
Digital marketing encompasses online channels on the internet such as search engines, social media, email, and paid advertising to reach current and prospective clients.
Content Marketing
Content Marketing is where businesses create content to educate potential customers about products and services. This can be in the form of an infographic, blog, eBook, and more.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media can be an effective channel to generate awareness. You can use Social Media Marketing on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to highlight the behind-the-scenes look into your brand.
How Do I Create a Marketing Strategy?
To create an effective marketing strategy, break it down into the following phases:
- Be remarkable and memorable
- Define your target audience
- Research the competitors
- Create Buyer Personas
- Develop a Message Framework
- Aim for Pain Points
- Shake up the funnel and channels
- Define Goals & how you measure success
- Track what’s working and optimize until you get results
Marketing Readiness Checklist
Before you start your marketing, you need to determine whether you’re ready for marketing. Here’s a checklist to help through the process.
1. Make Your Brand Remarkable
Nothing’s worse than going into a competitive landscape with an unremarkable. For your brand to stick out and stand up, it needs to have a wow factor. Everything from your business look and feel to the messaging matters.
2. Define Your Target Audience
Wherever and however you communicate with your intended audience is crucial to the foundation of your marketing blueprint.
Defining your audience provides tremendous value in creating authentic messaging that resonates beyond the brand.
3. Perform a Competitor Analysis
This is critical to establishing your business strategy and helps you make informed marketing decisions on what’s your next step. You’ll uncover market trends, strengths, and weaknesses of the competitors, learn strategies that can provide your brand with an advantage, and more.
4. Create Buyer Personas
Think of Buyer Personas as the SIM characters you created back when that was still a hip thing. A buyer persona represents a profile of your ideal customer. It’s used to help guide your marketing strategy to help tailor and narrow down your messaging and efforts. Depending on your target focus, you may have more than one buyer persona.
Remember, your goal isn’t to target everyone.
5. Develop a Message Framework
A Message Framework is purpose-driven. It provides companies with a strategic plan for how they can approach their marketing. Over time, as your company evolves, so should your Message Framework.
Determine how to best communicate your business to your target audience to increase brand awareness and foster brand loyalty. It helps you identify marketing messages and channels that will resonate best with your target audience. Messaging will help guide the voice of the brand on the website and in digital advertising.
6. Aim for Pain
When it comes to describing your products and services, we often get stuck on the features. Batteries, for example, may include or 1-Year Warranty. But does this really resonate with the client? No. The client cares about their needs, their wants, and their desires. Rather than focusing on the features, focus on the benefits and how they can help solve their pain points.
7. Align Content to a Marketing Funnel
For your marketing efforts to work well, you should create a marketing funnel and align your strategies and content to every stage. You can learn how to create a marketing funnel on this blog post.
8. Define Your Goals & How You Measure Success
Marketing must fit into your overall business goals and they should be measurable. Here are a few high-level goals you can use for inspiration.
- Increase website traffic by 50%.
- Grow pipeline by 30 new leads.
- Sell 100 products in a quarter.
9. Always Track and Optimize Your Marketing Results
Marketing is a balance of art and science. And even more importantly, it takes time. As your efforts evolve, it’s important to track campaign progress and always look for opportunities to improve.
Over time, you’ll see plenty of success stories. The downside is that sometimes, you have to be patient.
In Summary
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