Approaching a marketing strategy

Every time I meet a new client I get very excited about how we can improve their marketing, whether it’s just social media marketing, a direct marketing campaign or a wider marketing strategy. Everyone, especially the clients, have their own ideas, but I tend to always approach the strategy in the same way.

It’s not anything unconventional. My mystic ways of the marketing strategy are pretty standard marketing practice, straight from the grubby classrooms of Oxford Brookes when I was doing my CIM diploma, but sometimes when you know your business too well or you feel like you’ve done it all before it can be very easy to overlook these few key areas.

Your Aims

First off, you need your aims. It might be to get more sales, brand awareness, convert some leads, whatever you need to do for the business. Make sure they are quantifiable or trackable in some way, so you know how your strategy is performing. That’s the main thing. Just use the tried and tested SMART criteria and go and put them on the top of your list.

Your Target Market

You know, the people you want to buy your product or service. Every business knows who they want to buy their product, but they might not know enough statistics and information to really pin their demographic down.

How many people are there in your target market? Is there a specific age group? Where do they live, where do they shop, where do they communicate with friends and how do they get their information? It feels like too much for smaller businesses to handle, but happily with a bit of research and analysis it’s really easy to build a comprehensive picture of who would like to spend their money with you.

Your Message

Marketing a small business with a coherent message can be hard. If there is more than one person involved in getting communication out, even if there are just two separate offices or directors or a mix of shareholders; what your target market sees from your website, blog, social media post, email campaign or advertising can be very different.

You need to ensure that whatever you are promoting, your message is the same without. The same values, ways of referring to things, punctuation… This does of course depend very much on how you are marketing yourselves (if you are a small team of eccentric artists passionate about your own agendas within the same marketing channel, then yes that’s fine), but whatever you do, I’m sure you want to appear trustworthy and professional to any potential customers. And if all your marketing materials reads in the same way, with the same overall message, then you’re getting there with that one.

Your Channels

There’s a lot of ways you can market your business, but always a limited budget and not enough time. This is where knowing your market comes in. When you know WHO they are, you know WHERE they are, so you can focus your activities.

Take a look at all the possible ways you can reach your chosen sectors, which will be the most effective (look at what has worked well in the past), then how you can monitor your activity and what time you have. 

Your Actions

• You know what you want to achieve, who you’re going to target and where you’re going to do it. Now is the time to think about what you can do. I normally go through each channel and list some actions that will help achieve the goals. So, if you wanted to start a social media campaign you might need to:Set up or update your profiles
• Draft some tweets for the campaign
• Schedule in those tweets
• Find peers, potential customers or influential users to follow
• Retweet anything of interest
• Monitor the responses

Your Deadlines

Actions are all very well, but we all know how momentum can be lost and ideas evaporate because time runs away with you and suddenly it’s year end and you haven’t done anything.

So, make sure there are some dates in there. You need deadlines to work to, and make them realistic to how both you and your company work or you’ll just be disappointing yourself.

Your Monitoring

If you’re not tracking what you’re doing, you don’t know if it’s working. You don’t know how you can improve, what worked well, even which segment of your target market responded the best. So, think about your monitoring before you undertake the actions – what tracking methods can you put in place? How often should you analyse responses or effectiveness? How about a nice final report? It doesn’t have to be fancy, especially if you’re not necessarily going to be presenting it to anyone, but an excel spreadsheet somewhere in your files will be a godsend next time you’re planning similar activities or want to update your strategy.

Work on all of these elements and you’ll have a marketing strategy to work towards. You could also put all your actions in a handy chart to keep you on track and motivated (especially if you’re like me and love a To Do list).

If you need a bit of help completing your marketing strategy, or talk through any of these points, you can contact me. I love talking about all aspects of marketing and would be very happy to help, even if it’s just a brief chat to get you started. Good luck!