Follow these marketing strategy guidelines to gain clarity, direction and focus
A marketing strategy is simply a roadmap on how you’re going to achieve your goals. It is a document that specifies what paid, earned and organic marketing efforts you’re going to carry out across all the channels you have at your disposal to create a tangible plan for growth.
Developing a marketing strategy might seem like a daunting task at first but it doesn’t have to be that way. Continue reading for my step-by-step guide on how to create a marketing strategy that will give your business clarity, direction and focus.
Set Your Overall Business Goals
You can’t expect to successfully spread your message far and wide if you aren’t clear about the bare bones of your business. Before searching out customers or pushing sales, you need to know where your business is now and where you want it to go.
Your business goals can be simple but they need to be specific enough to give you direction for your marketing strategy. For example, a hair and make-up studio could have the following business goals:
Increase make-up bookings
Launch a haircare range
Gain more 18-25-year-old customers
Know Your Audience
Start discovering similarities in your customers’ demographics (age, location, gender) and psychographics (values, interests, lifestyle) and, from this, create three customer profiles. Think of these as avatars that represent your three most common customers.
This will clarify what content you should be sharing, which products and services you should offer and how you should be interacting with your audience.
For example, if the hair and make-up studio wants to increase make-up bookings and a majority of its customer base is currently 30+ year-olds, it should concentrate on promoting its services for weddings, while also focusing on other angles they would be interested in such as skincare and pampering.
Decide on Your Channels
Using your previously set business goals and audience knowledge, think about where and how you’re going to communicate with your customers. Remember, you don’t have to be everywhere, you just have to be where your customers are.
Committing to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest advertising alongside organically posting to those platforms plus TikTok and Snapchat as well as creating YouTube full-length videos and shorts while you juggle email marketing and blog writing as a small business owner is not only going to drive you insane, but it’s also not going to work.
For example, if the above hair and make-up studio wants to target 18-25-year-olds, it should focus its social media marketing efforts on TikTok and Instagram. It should keep up to date with pop culture and modern trends so that it can create valuable and interesting email newsletters and how-to blogs to showcase its expertise and build community.
Set KPIs
Before you start sharing content, set KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for each channel so you have a benchmark to work towards. The most common way to do this is to use SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound) KPIs that will keep your efforts on track and realistic.
Examples of KPIs for the hair and make-up studio would be:
Average open rate of 10% after sending 10 weekly newsletters.
15 website visits in one month that come directly from organic Instagram.
100 new followers on TikTok following three months of posting.
Don’t Neglect Your Reporting
You can do all of the above steps perfectly, but without regularly checking your insights, it could all be for nothing. One of the most damaging things for a business is to assume that its messaging is perfect without checking to see if the proof is in the pudding.
Every month, delve into the performance of each marketing channel to find out what is working and what isn’t. You might be surprised at the results, you might even disagree, but use reporting as a tool to discover what content is going to help reach your business goals most effectively.
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