24/06/2022
If you’re ready to grow your business to the next level and you’re not sure where to start, it’s worth thinking about developing a marketing strategy.
As a business moves through the growth cycle, income becomes more stable and thoughts move from survival and stability to expansion and growth. It’s around that time that business owners start to consider allocating budget to tasks and activities that might need to be strengthened. One of these areas will no doubt be marketing, which in its most simple form can help a business to find new clients and retain the ones that they already have.
Marketing can seem like a minefield with so many options available and so many opinions on the things you should be doing, no wonder business owners find it daunting. When you get to a point of being able to invest your hard-earned profits into marketing you want to be sure that you are making the best possible choices.
If this sounds like you, and perhaps you’ve dabbled in marketing before but not seen the results you were hoping for, you might be ready for a marketing strategy.
Here are 5 key benefits of developing a marketing strategy
Take a step back to view the bigger picture – with a Marketing Audit
If you’ve been working hard on the day to day running of the business, you’ve probably spent your time focusing on selling, keeping your clients happy, and doing the tasks that are the most urgent on your to-do list. Taking some time out to really look at your business performance so far is a worthwhile exercise. By reviewing your business holistically, you can work out what’s going on both internally and externally that could be having a positive or negative impact. This is known as a marketing audit and you can undertake this process yourself or with your team if you have one, and there are lots of tools available to help you. PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental). Porters 5 Forces (which will help you to analyse your competitive landscape). There are others but these are 2 good ones to get started.
Find out what might be holding you back with a SWOT analysis
The marketing audit can seem quite daunting to begin with but is well worth putting the time into as you will end up with a really good understanding of the positive changes you can make to help you to meet your objectives. The internal view will highlight any problems within the business that might be holding you back, as well as strengths that you can build upon to give you a competitive advantage. The external view will help you to spot opportunities that you perhaps weren’t aware of and any potential threats that could impact your business in the future. Combined this is known as a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), and provides a powerful way to start planning the future direction of your business
Understand what your customers want and need – with Customer Research
Most businesses exist to serve a customer need, whether that be a single need for a particular type of customer or multiple customer groups and needs. Whatever your situation, it’s important to understand what your customers want and need, so that you can continue to meet their needs and potentially come up with new opportunities to serve them. Often you can glean valuable information from your existing customers through customer research. This doesn’t have to be expensive commissioned research; it can be as simple as working out a couple of key bits of information that you’d like to know and then asking them if they would mind participating/. Some example questions could be”
a. What do you like most about working with us?
b. Is there anything that you would like to change?
c. Can we support you in another area?
d. How likely are you to move suppliers?
This can provide really powerful insights into how you can support your current customers better in the future, and whether there are any problems that might make them defect to another provider. The insights you gain here can feed into your marketing strategy.
Create a marketing plan - focused on meeting your business goals
Now you’ve done the hard work you can start to formulate a plan that will focus on your time and budget in the places that are most likely to achieve success. You can prioritise the areas that are most likely to bring the results that you are looking for, and if you have identified any areas that are holding you back you will know what to tackle first and why.
Remember, advertising is only one area of marketing and not everything you might need to do will cost money. There are activities that may take up your time, that might be better to outsource if you don’t have the resources to do them in house. Let your work so far determine the most important areas to focus on, and this should help you to avoid getting side-tracked by other noise in the marketing arena that might not be best for your business.
Having a clear plan on what you are going to do and why is the best thing you can do to achieve your goals.
Focus on results
A big mistake the companies often make is not measuring results of the efforts they have put in either with time and resources or marketing budget. The key to getting this right is to understand up front how you will measure results. A fairly crude measure like number of enquiries or sales may seem like the way forward, but its only effective if you apply it within context, otherwise you could be comparing apples with oranges. A good example is within the world of online search, where there are a couple of options available:
Pay Per Click (PPC) – where you simply pay each time someone clicks on your ad. This can yield immediate results and can be switched on and off where required.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – where you build the credibility of your website with Google (other search engines do exist!) so that you can appear higher up in the rankings over a longer period of time.
If you decided that Search was the place to put your money, and tried both of these out, you might make a decision that PPC is right because it generated more leads during a particular space of time. But SEO could have built your credibility such that you continue to appear in a better position, way after the PPC budget has been spent.
This isn’t about favouring one of these methods over the other, both have their strengths and actually work really well when you focus on them together. It’s more about understanding what you are trying to achieve, what each method is likely to deliver, over what period of time, and measuring accordingly.
Whatever activity you decide to implement, make sure you understand your objectives for each and measure them against those objectives. This is a much bigger subject and we are just scratching the surface with this example, the aim is to choose the right activity for your individual business needs, and measure them appropriately.
In summary, it’s a really good idea to take a strategic approach to your marketing activity if you are looking at taking the next steps and focusing on growth. It will pay dividends to invest this time in planning the right activity and and to stay focused on the stuff that is more likely to make a difference. If the approach outlined above feels too time consuming for you at the moment, then why not considering engaging a marketing consultant to do the hard work for you?
To explore this further, contact us for a free marketing strategy consultation.
