Tips for Creating Your First Marketing Strategy

by Startacus Admin

Good marketing could be the biggest factor when it comes to making your business successful. Without it, customers and clients will only find you in two ways: word of mouth and coincidence. Waiting for people to just happen across your website obviously isn’t a viable strategy, and as powerful as word of mouth can be, it has limits.

Marketing can also be one of the hardest parts of running any business. To help counteract the difficulty and stress, what you need to do is create a marketing strategy. Here are some tips to help you do just that.

Measurable

Use analytics where possible to measure the success of each marketing method. Where analytics aren’t available, do whatever you can to keep track of details. Knowing ROI from each avenue is vital to future marketing strategies. As is knowing details of the audience you reached – age, gender, location, interests, etc. These things will help you further target and tailor your future advertising. 

It’s no good having several hundred thousand impressions on an advertising post/Tweet if only ten of those became engagements. Don’t consider a large number of impressions as success. If part of your marketing is a blog post, how many people read it, how many people went from it to your product/service, and how many then purchased? If you’re seeing a lot of people going to the product page but not purchasing, that might tell you something else needs to be looked at – like pricing – but that’s beside the point here.

Focus

Trying to please everyone will result in pleasing no one and the loss of revenue. Your target market may be broad, but how can you make your marketing more targeted? Perhaps you make shoes of all kinds, for all ages. Your marketing strategy could be just to say “We’ve got lots of shoes; buy them”, but that’s quite broad and it might be difficult to really pique interest. If it’s summer, why not focus your efforts on running shoes? If it’s winter, how about focusing on warm waterproof boots for children that are perfect for jumping in puddles and trudging through snow?

If your marketing can be targeted at multiple groups of people, do your research on each group to determine primarily which is most free with their cash and/or most influenced by advertising. The secondary purpose of your research will be to determine how best to tailor your marketing to the chosen audience.

Focus applies to localisation too. Some things will be better suited to a certain country or part of a country, right down to wording. For example, using the word ‘Autumn’ rather than ‘Fall’ in an American advert, or vice versa in a British ad, probably won’t cause utter confusion, but it could well make the recipient feel uncatered for or of secondary importance.

Goals 

Set goals for your marketing strategy. Again, this shouldn’t be to have X number of impressions on your Tweets, or even X number or shares and retweets. These might make you feel good, and the shares and retweets can certainly be useful, but in themselves they do not count as any kind of ROI.

Setting goals and targets for the strategy will help you in both of the aforementioned areas – focusing it and measuring it. Try to be realistic about these goals. Getting £1m in sales by the end of your marketing campaign might not be an appropriate goal. 

If your marketing strategy is for a long period, say a year or more, set short-term goals and targets as well as long-term ones. Aim for your marketing to increase your sales by so much every month, entice more readers to your articles every week, etc.

Tactics 

You know who you are going to target with your marketing, now you need to decide how. Don’t make it a single layer of marketing. Who have you already spoken to, perhaps in person, about your products or services? These people will need to be marketed to in a different way.

Set up your social media campaigns so they are targeting the right people, using the right wording and imagery, and posting at the right times on the right days of the week. Print your adverts in the right magazines and papers, and if applicable paste them across the side of cars, busses, and billboards (although since this is your first marketing strategy, these things might be a touch too far). But email, Skype, call, visit those contacts you have already made. If it feels right, offer them a small discount or deal for being among the first to show interest.

Try to think of marketing tactics that are less often used. Assuming these aren’t little used because they don’t work, this could help you stand out more. Not every form of advertising has to be advertorial. A well written guest article on a relevant business website, for example, could draw readers to your own website, which should then do its job of enticing them to purchase.

Budget 

This heading doesn’t really need anything below it. Budget. It’s obvious. Once you know how you are going to go about your marketing, you will have everything you need to work out how much you are going to have to spend. Fiddle with your tactics and budget until everything looks okay and you’re not going to bankrupt yourself before your first sale comes in. And don’t forget to factor all this into your cashflow forecast!

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Published on: 22nd November 2016