The Most Important Things to Consider When Creating a Marketing Strategy

Building an effective marketing strategy is crucial if you want to make the most of current trends, customer behavior and leverage the best ROI for your business.

The world of marketing is a densely populated one and entering into it without a well thought out approach means you run the risk of focusing your time and resources on something that just isn’t right for your business.

It can be a bit overwhelming to start building a marketing strategy, so let’s look at the most crucial things you should consider. 

What Your Business is All About

Understanding your business might sound easy, but especially when first starting out, it can be difficult to decide which direction you want to take it in. A great place to start is by delving into the story behind your brand – why was it set up? What did you want to achieve? What problem are you trying to solve? Don’t hold back – delve into the strengths and weaknesses, what you’re currently doing well and what you could be doing better. Honesty is key at this stage – remember that everyone starts somewhere.

By understanding the story behind your brand, it makes it a lot easier to understand the business as a whole and what marketing efforts are going to fit with the brand and its personality. 

Another important area to look into at this stage is the market that you’ll be entering into. Competitor analysis is great for helping you to see where your business stands in comparison – and is a great way for you to understand what your USP is and how it makes you stand out from your competitors. Even look at what they’re doing well and think about how you could develop and incorporate similar approaches in your own strategy. 

Your Marketing Goals

Without knowing what you’re working towards, you can’t plan how to get there. Whether your brand is a new startup or an existing business that’s in need of a strategy refresh, sitting down and doing an in depth look at where you are currently versus where you want to be is a great way to get started. Once these goals have been set, you can start implementing the steps to help you get there far easier than if you were going into it with no set idea of where you want your business to go. 

Are you looking to drive traffic to your website, build a large social media presence, generate more leads or all of the above? One thing to remember is to always set SMART goals. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-Bound). If you set goals that are unreachable and unrealistic, you’re not going to move forward as effectively as if you set smaller, attainable goals that you can make happen. 

Including these goals within your marketing strategy not only gives you something to work towards, but also helps to give motivation to work hard and stick at it – business isn’t always easy! 

Your Target Audience

After researching more into your own business and its goals, it’s time to define your target audience. The previous stages really help to make this easier as you’ll have a better understanding of what type of customer your business will appeal to. 

Understanding your audience is absolutely crucial when building a marketing strategy, as it will define every single aspect of the marketing that you execute. It also helps to build that customer/business relationship and trust. Once you know who you’re aiming to reach, you can create content that appeals to their interests and demographic and therefore build a better brand reputation that will (hopefully!) lead to a better ROI. 

Steps to help you define your target audience:

• Analyse competitors. Who are they marketing towards and how is this represented across their platforms?
• Conduct market research – find gaps in the market and think about how your business could fill them.
• Define who your audience ISN’T. Narrowing down your initial audience pool makes it a lot easier when trying to define exactly who you want to push your business towards. 
• What age/gender/location is your product/service going to appeal to?

Implementing Your Marketing Strategy

Now that you’ve got an understanding of your business, its goals and your target audience, it’s time to start thinking about how you’re going to go about reaching those goals and getting your business seen by the right people.

Based on your target audience, you can now start thinking about how you’re going to reach them at each stage of the customer journey. Identify the different touchpoints that you can utilise – whether it’s Organic/Paid Social, SEO, Email Marketing, Display Advertising. What’s going to get you seen by your audience and what’s going to make them want to come back for more? 

It’s important to remember that there isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ approach for marketing, (it would be a lot easier if there was!), so trial and error is perfectly normal at the beginning stages. The more you research and understand who your audience are, the better you know how to target them and what they like/don’t like. 

Need help creating your marketing strategy? Our team of experts will be happy to help.

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