What entails an effective marketing strategy? More than simple bullet points. Sure, they can prove useful, but if you really want to create an effective marketing strategy, there are a couple of things you must focus on to ensure you do it right.
So, to help you create a great marketing strategy, there are a few major components that we need to discuss. Here they are:
1 – Your Goals
If you don’t know where you’re going, it’s going to be tough to get there. For example, if your goal is to increase leads by 50% in a month, you have to specify that in your marketing plan.
It tells you exactly what to do, how much you should spend, how many leads you need to generate, how many sales you need to achieve, and how much revenue growth you need. It’s all about stating your goal, defining it, and then making sure that you measure it.
2 – Your Target Audience
Everyone knows that in order to market your business, you have to determine who you’re marketing to. Your target market should be defined in your marketing plan, and you should determine what you need to do to target them.
For example, when marketing to teenagers, you might want to use social media to reach them, but if marketing to lawyers, you might have to use a different approach.
You also need to consider your target audience’s demographics, psychographics, and even their technical skills. For example, are they online or offline? If they’re online, do they use a mobile device or a laptop? Such details will help you make better decisions on how you should market to them.
3 – Your Competitors
We need to start doing our research on our competitors and make sure we have an overview of who they are, what they do, and how they’re using marketing to their advantage.
It’s important to have an understanding of what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong. This will help you move forward with your marketing strategy and ensure that you’re doing a good job at it.
4 – Your Content Strategy
If you want to accomplish your goals in your marketing strategy, you need to have a very clear content strategy. This includes how you’re going to create, publish and promote the content you create.
You also need to understand how fast you need to publish and promote content, how consistent you need to be in your publishing, and how much content is enough, as too much will cause you to lose your audience.
5 – Your Metrics
This is another overlooked portion of many marketing strategies. When you specify what you need to accomplish and how you’re going to get there, you have to have a way of tracking your progress towards that goal.
For example, if your goal is to attract new leads and have them fill out a form with their contact information, you have to have a way of tracking how many leads you’re sending, how many forms are being filled out, and the conversion rate of those forms.
Without this, you won’t know if your strategy is working, and you’ll have a hard time making changes to it.
Conclusion
Creating a marketing strategy is going to involve a lot of different components. It might take some time, and it might take some research too. However, it’s an integral part of your business, and you have to do it right if you want to be successful.
While it’s going to be a thorough process, it can also be very rewarding. If you plan well and implement all of the above factors, you’re going to see much better results from your marketing efforts.
Cyrusson is a creative agency that helps businesses stay on top of their online marketing efforts. If you are looking for a digital marketing agency in San Francisco, reach out to us today!