Businesses spend a fortune on their marketing efforts, and unfortunately, some simply come up short. Businesses are supposed to spend 7% to 8% of their revenue on marketing, but without the right plan, that money just goes to waste!
Table of Contents
Step 1. Market Research
Before you get started on anything involving your strategy, you need to gather information about your target audience, their needs, and problems that YOU can solve.
Assuming you already know who your target audience is (more or less) there are easy ways to develop a better understanding of the market. Let’s dive in!
MEET PEOPLE WHERE THEY ARE
Now, you could just use trial and error for your social media strategy and see which one takes off, but it will be time-consuming and wasteful. The best way to get an idea is to use generational and demographic factors along with your own business model.
For example, if your target audience is Gen Z, then you know that Instagram is the place to reach them.
BUT, it is always a good idea to diversify! Sure, Gen Z loves Instagram, but they also use TikTok. Try to incorporate what you can. There has been plenty of demographic research on who uses which platforms, so use that to your advantage.
The best part about social media is that once you’ve developed a following, market research becomes a lot easier.
You can always conduct polls or simply engage with your audience to learn more!
Keyword Research
The next is to develop important keyword research for your ad campaigns, and more importantly, your website. Using the right keywords for your intended audience will strongly increase your website’s SEO value and help you rank for various keywords and searches.
There are many keyword tools available online but you can start simply by entering terms into Google’s search engine, seeing what comes up, and punching them into Google Trends for comparison.
That’s a good place to start, but this should be ongoing and continuous throughout your marketing strategy, rather than a “set it and forget it” kind of deal.
Step 2. Identify Your Strategies
In order to develop the right marketing strategy, you have to create subgroups and figure out how they should work together.
If every part of your strategy is simply off doing its own thing, you aren’t maximizing the potential of your marketing efforts. Here’s what you need to identify.
Physical Marketing Strategy
Physical marketing is how you market in or outside of your physical location, your word of mouth marketing, and anything else that doesn’t rely on the internet. While newspaper ads aren’t what they used to be, physical marketing still has its place. Here’s what you need to identify.
Modes
What methods do you intend to use for your physical marketing strategy? Are you going to run ads in the paper, pass out business cards, send out flyers, or rely on customers to spread the word? This is what you need to figure out.
Again, these modes still have their place, especially for local businesses. In fact, many marketers agree that word-of-mouth is the most effective form of marketing available today. This makes sense when you think about it. You see countless ads every day, but when your close friend recommends something, it has more meaning.
Referral programs for your loyal customers and quality service are great ways to facilitate this and are still highly effective tools to add to your marketing mix.
Goals
What are the goals of your marketing strategies?
Do you want to raise awareness of an event? Get people to sign up for something? Bring in new customers? Increase your loyalty rewards program members?
You should think long and hard about these goals before launching your campaign.
Digital Marketing Strategy
Yes, digital marketing gets all the attention these days because it’s just so simple and effective.
There are countless tools that help you reach the widest audience possible.
Again, you’re going to want to determine the modes and goals that you want to use.
Modes
SEO, PPC, social media marketing, notifications, and email campaigns. These have a few things in common, including the fact that you should be using them and that they all rely on your website.
Having a professional website is at the center of your entire digital marketing strategy, so start by having one professionally developed. This will ensure that you start with a good SEO foundation and that you improve your conversions among your other strategies.
Use a wide variety of tools at your disposal and do your best to integrate them.
Goals
The goal of most of your digital marketing strategies should be to direct traffic to your website.
Your website should be professional, easy to navigate (on any device), and it should direct people to where you want them to go.
Once people are at your website, you have total control over whatever goal you want to achieve. This means that whether you want people to sign up for notifications, newsletters, or subscriptions, you can do that. If you want to make sales, you can direct traffic toward your products.
That means that you should add calls to action throughout your site to bring users where you want them to go.
Step 3. Integrate Your Efforts
Your marketing efforts are strongest when they work together. You should not only be using the same tone of voice, font, colour scheme, and imagery to build your brand identity, but you should be using each tool to work TOGETHER!
For example, your website should have social media buttons on every page to help build a following on social media. That’s a super easy way to build an audience.
Digital Integration
Again, try your best to keep everything uniform, but use all of your tools in the most efficient way possible to create a funnel to where you want to direct your customers.
Sharing content on social media will help bring users to your website, sign up for newsletters, share your content, and even build a backlink channel. You can promote your best content across your notifications, email newsletters, and search ads as well.
"Phygital" Integration
The term “phygital” is a combination of physical and digital that is used in the marketing world.
This is the process of creating a uniform experience between the digital and physical spaces of your brand, including your:
- Flyers
- Business cards
- Ads
- Website
- Social media posts
- Emails
- Catalogs
- Video content
And more. This includes your tone of voice, color scheme, font, and overall brand identity.
For example, put your social media handles up at your company’s physical location and ask customers to like and follow your business, or ask for reviews on Yelp to help with your SEO and online reputation.
Put links to your website on your business cards, flyers, and more. Have people sign up for physical promotional material like mail campaigns on your website and social media. The possibilities are endless.
Put It To Work
Now that you know some important steps for your marketing strategy, remember that they are only valuable if you actually put them to use.
Simply follow these steps and adapt them to your specific goals and needs, and you’ll start seeing results!
Let me know in the comments which of these strategies you are most excited to start using!
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If you are interested in working together to create the perfect marketing strategy, check out our marketing strategy services.
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