With a strong marketing presence, any company can rise to the top of it’s industry. However, getting to the top requires perseverance and hard work. Not every marketing strategy you come up with is a good marketing strategy. You need to be able to distinguish between certain marketing plans to come up with the best combination to hit your marketing objectives. The process of finding that balance comes with trials and tribulations, but it can be easily overcome the more hard work and research you put into it. The team here at ThunderQuote have created a list of the 8 key steps to creating the best marketing strategy for your team so that you reach your marketing objectives!
The first step would be to focus on your market. It might seem obvious to you, but sometimes the simplest steps will be mostly forgotten. This particular step, if forgotten, will be the reason your marketing strategies fail. You should be targeting a market that is narrowly defined. Remember that you can’t cast a net wide enough to capture everyone’s attention. You should focus on your first target market initially and once you’ve gotten a decent following, then go on and cast a wider net.
For example, if you’re deciding to enter the retail business, you can’t jump in and please everyone. Therefore, you should start will filtering down your customer base strictly first. Do you want to sell the men and women and do they have a specific age group or should they have a specific geo location? Sit down before you start planning out your best marketing strategies and list down your target market. You might think that it seems tedious, but trust us, it will benefit you in the long run.
We lined this up as the second step because it technically works hand in hand with step one. Think of it as a lovely package wrapped into one successful marketing strategy! Always sit down and plan this out. If you are a software company offering multiple services, you need to know which one is more viable to spend more time and effort marketing. Let your customers know exactly what they are getting. Is it going to be a product key? Will they get 24 hour customer service? How can they contact you when they need advice or need troubleshooting? Things like these need to be advertised and marketed properly to ensure that your customers know the full story before purchasing your service.
There is no way you can go into any business without knowing exactly who you’re going up against. It’s just like going into a fight blindly. There is no way you can create the best marketing strategy if you do not survey the competition first. Your marketing plan needs to include a case study on all your competitors and how they handle the market. This way you can find out what else to do to ensure your company comes out on top!
You need to ask yourself questions like “why should my customers spend their money on me instead of the competitor?” and frame your marketing strategy around that connotation. What can you offer that is different and more beneficial to your customers? Allow for honest answers to questions like these so that you can come up with the best marketing strategies!
A great marketing strategy that is promised to bring around success in the long run will always have measurable and quantifiable numbers. You need to sit down with your team and come up with a short-term plan as well as a long-term plan. These plans needs to have numbers, deadlines, targets and budgeting to ensure that everything is accounted for.
By having a clear way to measure your success and take down how much you’ve done, this will be easy to track how well your company is doing. Going in without figuring out a way to calculate your success is a bad marketing strategy.
Ensure you have solid goals like wanting to reach “10000 downloads of your app by the end of the year”. This will serve as a vision board and it will be much easier to work towards rather than going at it without a clear end goal.
Once you’ve settled on your brand and how you want it to be known as, the next step would be to make sure it gets seen. It will be hard for a potential client to find your awesome business if it’s not easily accessible. Therefore, you should develop awareness for your brand and this should be included in your marketing strategy!
If you want a customer to take your brand seriously and for them to make the conversion from just a casual reader that has come across your product into a buyer, you need to make sure they’ve seen and appreciated your product or service multiple times first. It is more likely for someone to purchase your service if they’ve seen it many times before actually taking the plunge the buy it.
After you’ve made your brand noticeable to the general public, the next thing you need to do is to make sure they trust your brand and must have a positive reaction towards it. Your company should be known as industry leaders that your customers can always trust.
Your customers need to know that you are credible enough to deliver what you advertise. Therefore, always stick to your promise and always say what you mean and execute whatever you may have promised.
If you are a company that offers expensive services like marketing consultations, you should allow your potential customer to have a one week free trial so that they get a feel of exactly what you do. This allows you to build a relationship with them and this will lead to a more credible and sustainable relationship between your company and your customers.
Seeing that everyone is basically living their lives on the internet nowadays, you need to remember to include your mobile readers as well. They will make up a significant part of your target customer pool. Mobile marketing is becoming increasingly popular as well as digital marketing as a whole.
You should have a mobile-friendly version of your company website that will extend to your mobile customers. Ensuring that you have a mobile website also means that you are taking the initiative to keep up to date with the current times and that you care about that niche target audience as well.
At the end of the day, no marketing strategy is going to be set in stone. Strategies change and trends come and go. Marketing objectives will change over time and will either be added or discarded from your entire marketing strategy. It is a dynamic environment that grows and adds to itself every single day.
Having a marketing management plan is crucial but just note that it does not need to be set in stone or be followed religiously! Always test the waters and if something does not work, set it aside and work towards the same goal but in a different way. Always remember that there are a lot of ways to get to the end goal and that every marketing strategy will be different for different companies!
Here at ThunderQuote we hope that we have helped you narrow down the best steps to ensure you build the strongest marketing strategy you can that will help your company boom!
ThunderQuote is the most comprehensive business services portal in Singapore, Australia and ASEAN , where hundreds of thousands of dollars of procurement contracts are sourced every month by major companies like Singapore Press Holdings, National Trade Union Congress and more.