There are myriads of marketing tactics and strategies. Every business is different and so is the effect of different marketing strategies. The marketing strategy of any business depends on the marketing goals, location, budget, target audience and the personality of the business. So, no one can formulate a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy. There are unlimited varieties of marketing mixes and most of the businesses struggle with choosing the right mix for them. If you too doubt the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, you have landed on the right page. Here we are discussing the step by step guide to creating the right marketing strategy for any business.
Determine your business’s marketing goals
The best way to make an effective plan is to start working in the reverse direction. Unless you don’t know where you want to reach, you won’t know the path you need to choose. So, decide your marketing goal the first thing. Do you want to build brand awareness? Are you more interested in boosting your direct sales? Is lead generation your target? You need to know the honest answer to these questions. Once you have your clearly defined marketing goal, you can draw the line from there to your present position.
Know your contenders
Whatever is your business; you must already have competitors working in the same industry. You need to analyze their strengths and weaknesses. It is necessary to know and understand your competitors because without that knowledge it would be difficult to lure their customer base. You need to tell your target audience that you are unique from your competitors and you have something more to offer to the customers. This ‘more’ can be more competitive price, better after sale services, better customer services, better quality of the product or anything like that.
Understand your target audience
It is imperative to understand your target audience because they are the axis around which all your marketing efforts will revolve. Failing to understand the preferences of your target audience is nothing much different in failing in our business endeavors. You need to know exactly whom do you want to target and plan your strategies to directly hit that target. In this highly competitive era, you cannot afford to keep throwing darts in every direction with a blindfold and hope to hit the target.
Understand the basic concepts of the marketing strategies
Knowing your marketing goals, competitors and target audiences are all the prerequisites of choosing a marketing strategy. Once you have got the answer to those questions, you should start understanding the concepts of the available marketing strategies. You need to understand what efforts and budget will be needed for each kind of marketing strategies. It is also important to know the time period needed for each strategy to start showing the result. In addition to knowing them individually, you should also get their comparative analysis to better your understanding. What is the Difference Between Traditional Marketing vs Digital Marketing? It is a very good comparative analysis of these two broad categories of marketing strategies. We would like to point it out that a mixture of several marketing strategies is always better than choosing a single marketing technique.
Create your Marketing Budget
Now that you know your goals and have understood different marketing strategies, it’s the time to create your marketing budget. The budget will obviously be affected by the size of the business and some other factors. Having a well-defined budget will help you make solid marketing strategies that can bring you the desired result (obviously, only if you set realistic goals with your budget). You can choose to distribute your marketing budget in equal parts for different marketing strategy or provide more budgets for the one that seems best to you. There’s no set rule here and any answer can be the right answer given that you don’t ignore the next step.
Get data and analyze the results
Collecting and analyzing the result data is one of the most important steps if not the most. Even if you hire world’s best economist to create the marketing strategy and allow the budget, you’ll need to analyze and tweak your strategies. You are putting your marketing efforts practically in the dynamic market so you cannot expect it to bring the net calculated result as theoretical mathematics. Keep analyzing and tweaking your marketing strategies according to the market demands and you’ll keep getting positive results from your marketing efforts.
Hope you got an answer to at least some of your queries about choosing the marketing strategy for your business.
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