The Importance of Having a Marketing Strategy in your Business

What Is a Marketing Strategy?

"A marketing strategy refers to?a business's overall game plan for reaching prospective consumers and turning them into customers of their products or services. A marketing strategy contains the company's value proposition, key brand messaging, data on target customer demographics, and other high-level elements" - Investopedia

There are four elements that make up the marketing mix, in which the 4ps of marketing are found to shape the crucial strategies to generate profits in the company and boost sales:

• ?Product strategies
• ?Pricing strategies
• Distribution strategies
• Promotion strategies

The Importance of Having a Marketing Strategy in Your Business

Choosing a suitable marketing strategy for the company will bring great advantages such as:

• ?Increased sales
• Creating sustainable growth for the company
• Understanding what your customers want
• Meet the needs and exceed the expectations of your customers
• Strengthening the relationship with the target market
• Top of the mind Awareness?

Marketing Strategies vs. Marketing Plan

In order to formulate strategies, it is necessary to have the marketing objectives in mind, since strategies must be implemented to achieve these objectives.

Marketing Plan

Driven by your strategy, your?marketing plan?is the execution; the roadmap of tactical marketing efforts that help you achieve your marketing goals. Your plan is a detailed campaign of what you will do, where you will do it when you will implement it, and how you will track the success

The Makeup of a Marketing Strategy

Executive Summary

An outline of your marketing strategy.

Background

Your background describes your business goals, marketing goals, and challenges.

Market Analysis

Your market analysis describes the opportunities, market sizing, market segments, and impacts that could affect your market (trends, economic, seasons).

?Target Audience

A detailed version of your?market segments?and their characteristics (from their demographics to psychographics, goals, pain, buying patterns, and positioning of benefits and unique selling proposition).

Competitive Analysis

Different categories of competitors and their characteristics including threats, market share comparison, differentiation, barriers to entry, etc.

Offering

This includes what you deliver or offer to the market, what the need is, the features and benefits for each segment, and how you intend on delivering those features or benefits.

Message

Determine the most important message to all segments and provide evidence to support that claim.

Selling

Write down the channels you sell through, who is involved in selling through each step of the sales process.

Additionally, describe the steps they take through each stage of the buying process and understand their buying criteria, this informs the content you can create and use in your marketing materials.

• Pricing?- Every customer has unique needs. In some cases, the price may not be an important criterion in the process. Is this true for your segment? What is your pricing model? Is it tiring? Are there discounts? Make sure to include competitive pricing, the perceived value of your product or service compared to the price, services that you include in the price, and how the consumer trends could drive the price up or down.
• Communication and promotion?- What is the communication pattern with customers? Can we add any marketing activities from that? What other materials could help them? How else would they like to hear about us and our services? What key channels are useful and relevant? What are the most effective channels?

?What’s included in your marketing plan?

?Executive Summary

Provide a brief overview of the marketing plan.

Target Market

Provide an overview of your target market, its pain points, goals, buying patterns, and messaging.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Your KPIs measure the success of your marketing campaign. Here are some examples of KPIs for your marketing campaign:?

• Sales Revenue
• Cost Per Lead
• ?Client Value
• Inbound Marketing ROI
• Website Traffic-to-Lead Ratio
• Lead-to-Client Ratio
• Landing Page Conversion Rates
• Organic Traffic

?Situation Analysis

Describe your goals, strengths, weaknesses, environmental factors, and market analysis to clearly articulate your challenges and impacts on your business moving forward.

4 P's of Marketing?

• Product?- What you are offering in the marketplace and how it is different from competitors.
• Price?- How is your pricing model different? What is the dollar amount and structure? Why will customers choose your product or service over others??
• Place?- Today's digital environment demands a shift toward online sales. Is online the first place that your buyers will see your product? What other avenues will you sell your product to?
• Promotion?- Where will you be promoting your product? Through online advertising? Email marketing?
• Blogging? Ensure that each avenue selected will truly impact your revenue.

?

Marketing Plan

From your website to social media, to content and the channels you will engage on with potential clients, your marketing plan is a critical component to achieve your business objectives and produce results for your company.

• Website and Branding

Does your website messaging resonate with your personas? Is it set up to generate leads for your business? Even if a potential buyer isn't ready to purchase your service or product today, doesn't mean they won't later. Establish yourself as a thought leader, providing helpful content on your website to bring leads in until they are ready to buy from you.

• Content Strategy and Plan

What content already exists? Does this make sense for your marketing campaign? Do you need to update the messaging so it captivates and engages your audience?

• Channels

What channels will you use to reach your audience? Where are they most active? Ask your avatars which channels they are on.?

• Social Media Plan

How are you using?social media? Are you engaging with thought leaders? Replying back to happy clients? What is your posting frequency? What KPIs are you tracking to measure success?

• Timeline

Ensure that you have a timeline for your campaign. Over time this will help you measure the overall success and effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

• Resources/Budget

What is the amount you will allocate to advertising, digital, website, event marketing, etc.?

• Responsibilities

Identify who is responsible for each part of the implementation. Is one person creating all the designs? Do you have a content writer that is responsible for blogging, social media posting, etc.?

Marketing Strategy gives you a bird's eye view of the direction you want to move your business. This is one of the very first things you need to do before any marketing campaign.

written by: Deji Okufi