Taking a strategic approach to marketing your business is no longer a luxury afforded to established companies and big players in the industry.
If you expect to consistently grow your business and compete in the new global marketplace, you must be able to successfully plan and execute a profitable, return-on-investment (ROI)-focused strategic marketing plan.
Unfortunately, many small business owners and independent entrepreneurs join the ranks of the self-employed without a solid understanding of the fundamentals of strategic marketing and instead take a “see what’s coming” approach, which invariably leads to lower-than-expected results and is a major contributor to the skyrocketing rate of new business bankruptcies.
To help you plan your strategic marketing approach, here are 7 steps to creating a concise small business marketing strategy:
Step 1: Create a marketing vision
Do you know what you are trying to achieve with your marketing efforts? What are your specific goals when it comes to growing and building your business? Understanding where you are and knowing where you want to go is the essential first step in developing an action plan to get there.
Step 2: Understand your market
Who is your perfect client or client? Do you know or are you just willing to accept any business that comes your way? Being able to identify, understand and empathize with your prospects will show them that you can relate to them and that you are genuinely concerned with providing a solution that works for them.
Being able to “speak the language” of your prospect will allow you to gain their trust and establish a relationship much faster, ultimately leading to greater success.
Step 3: Know your competition
What are your competitors doing well? What are they doing wrong? How will you stand out from them in the minds of your prospects?
Doing the right kinds of competitive analysis, including becoming a customer of your competition so you know firsthand what they offer and how well or poorly they deliver the sale.
You can learn a lot about their customer service, shipping methods, price and quality of products and much more by becoming their customer. You can also find out if and how they continue to market you after the initial sale has been completed.
Step 4 – Craft a Compelling Message
Once you understand what your objectives are, have a clear idea of what the market wants, what is important to them, and what gaps you can fill in the market by doing a thorough competitor analysis, you can craft a compelling marketing message to deliver. in a concise way the benefits of your service offering.
Your message should always be benefit-oriented and speak directly to the emotional wants and needs of your prospects. Your goal is to answer the two most important questions before they are asked: ‘what’s so good about that?’; and ‘what’s in it for me?
Finally, your message should generate a response. Gone are the days when getting “exposure” (aka branding) is enough to ensure your success. Today, you need to focus on marketing efforts that generate an immediate result so you can effectively measure your return on investment.
Step 5: Selection of message delivery systems
There are thousands (or rather, tens and even hundreds of thousands) of different ways that you can market your message in an attempt to reach your market; however, many of them will be ineffective at best.
Using your customer profile, you can start researching how to reach your prospects in the places where they already spend time. There’s no point in advertising in a dog magazine to promote your cat training system!
Do you want to advertise in the newspaper, online or by direct mail? What about the yellow pages, white papers, or trade publications? How about more “guerilla” style marketing, like organized events, public relations, or street teams?
There are too many options to list and it is your job to determine the right ones to reach your market in the most profitable way possible.
Step 6: Track your results
How will you know if your marketing efforts are successful or if you’re just throwing good money after bad by revamping a losing campaign? Tracking your efforts is a key component, made simple by taking a direct response approach with your marketing campaigns.
Using unique tracking codes (and requesting this information at the point of sale) will help you understand where your business is coming from so you can properly track your conversions.
Having shoppers clip a coupon, provide a VIP access code, or type in a specific website address for each different campaign are easy ways to start tracking the effectiveness of your marketing with the goal of doing more of what you want. works and less than what is not.
Step 7: Creating Marketing Systems
Once you have a working marketing plan, how will you automate or systemize it so that it can be even more effective with your time, getting more and better results with less human effort?
By developing a funnel approach to your marketing, you’ll be able to create a sense of continuity from one level of the funnel to the next. Your customers will not only feel more comfortable at each step, but they’ll also know how to respond or what action to take each time you have an interaction with that customer, based on where they are in the funnel process you’ve developed.
