Behind every successful business is a great marketing strategy. Without an effective marketing strategy, it’s much harder to acquire new customers and build a positive reputation as a brand.
Marketing covers several areas, including email, social media, and word-of-mouth marketing. Creating an effective marketing strategy involves identifying which types of marketing you’re going to use and how you’re going to use them.
Your marketing plan consists of a detailed outline of the marketing tools and techniques that you are going to use in a given period of time. Your marketing strategies should align with your business aims and should target the right audience.
A marketing plan is not set in stone and the marketing strategies that you use might change depending on the market. It’s important to regularly review your strategies and determine what, if anything, needs to be changed to ensure your success.
Many businesses choose to outsource their marketing to one of the top SAAS marketing agencies, instead of hiring full-time marketing team members or outsourcing to freelancer marketers.
Often, hiring an agency is easier than dealing with marketing on an in-house basis because marketing agencies are experts at what they do. They can yield better results more efficiently, helping your business to generate a higher income with minimal expenses.
When creating an effective marketing strategy, there are some important factors that you should consider to optimize the outcomes. Here are five factors to keep in mind as you write your marketing plan.
- Your Situation
You need to create a set of baselines before you can build a strong marketing plan. You can then build upon your baselines and then as references throughout your marketing campaigns.
Assess your current position and situation as a brand. Consider your current successes and the products or services that you currently offer.
Find out what your unique selling point (USP) is and consider what makes your brand stand out above your competitors. Do you offer quality, convenience, or affordability?
When performing situational analysis, make sure to identify where you stand in the current market. What are you doing well, and what could be improved? What are your competitors doing effectively, and how can you implement their marketing strategies into your own marketing plan.
A great way to do your analysis is to use something called a SWOT analysis. A SWOT analysis means identifying your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
This will help you to create an effective marketing strategy that will target your weaknesses and overcome any threats so that you can build an authoritative brand.
- Your Marketing Goals
Your goals and objectives define your whole marketing plan. You should define your main marketing goals at the very start of the process and they should align with your overarching goals as a business.
Your marketing goals might include generating more leads, increasing brand awareness, driving traffic to your website, or increasing conversion rates. Try to be realistic with your goals and don’t set too many at once, as this might make your marketing plan too complicated.
Also, make sure to create specific goals. For example, don’t just set a goal to ‘increase your website traffic’. Instead, set the goal of ‘increasing website traffic by 30% in the next three months’. If you want to create specific and realistic goals, use the SMART goals framework.
- Your Target Market
Creating a detailed overview of your target market is essential for knowing which marketing platforms and strategies you are going to use.
You should define the demographics, needs, challenges, and preferences of your target audience. Demographics include age, location, occupation, and other personal details.
When you know exactly who you are speaking to, you can cater your tone of voice and content creation to the right people who are going to be genuinely interested in your products or services.
Many brands choose to create something called a buyer persona, which is basically a detailed overview of their ideal customer. They enable you to easily visualize who you are speaking to and what kind of person you are targeting in your marketing campaigns.
- Your Budget
Marketing costs money, especially when it’s done right. However, the aim of effective marketing is to increase your return on investment and enable your brand to grow even further.
Don’t be afraid to spend money on high-quality marketing strategies because it’s often necessary to attract new customers and build a strong reputation for your brand.
It’s important to budget properly when it comes to marketing. If you plan on using paid marketing strategies, such as paper click (PPC) ads, you need to define how much money you can afford to spend on each of these things.
If you plan to outsource your marketing to an agency or freelancer, make sure to factor ongoing wages and payments into your budget.
- Promotional Techniques
When you have defined your target market, goals and objectives, and budget, you can start thinking about which promotional techniques you want to use. There is a wide range of promotional tools available but you don’t necessarily need to use all of them.
It’s often better to focus on succeeding in just a few promotional techniques to avoid overwhelming yourself or spreading your marketing team too thin. Narrowing your promotion down to just a few avenues is also more cost-effective and will minimize unnecessary expenses.
By creating a buyer persona, you will have already identified the main areas where your target audience is, and you will know where is best to reach them. You will also know at which stages of the buyer’s journey most of your audience are at.
Some common marketing techniques are email marketing, social media marketing (SMM), search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), and paid advertising. You might wish to use just one or all of these methods, depending on where you think your audience will be the most responsive.