What Is Your Marketing Strategy?

A marketing strategy involves setting specific goals to increase sales in order to gain the upper hand over your competition. The company that doesn’t keep up with a marketing plan will eventually go out of business. Marketing is incredibly important to the stability and growth of your brand, no matter if you are a dentist, retail storeowner, or photographer, you need a marketing strategy. So what’s yours?

It’s never too late to create a marketing strategy, and even if you already have one you will need to come up with another and another in order to remain successful over the long haul. Marketing strategies must change with consumer demand, societal shifts, the economy, and so much more.

The biggest brands in America continue to spend loads of money on advertisements even though the general public already knows who they are. But Vons, McDonalds, and Wal-Mart all know if they stop pushing ads, they will fold to the competition. No matter if your business is big or small, an appropriate and updated marketing strategy remains vastly important.

What Is A Marketing Strategy?

By combining all of your company plans to reach specific goals, you are creating a marketing strategy. A good marketing strategy can’t be created in only one day. Instead it takes a lot of planning and market research otherwise your strategy is actually only a guess. Your business is too valuable for you to go off of hunches.

As more channels of communication open up, marketing is further complicated. Today you have social media, television, radio, postcard mailers and more to address. Which is the best plan of action for your business goals? Do you need to use all outlets for advertising, or only a few?

The only way to answer these questions is to know insider details about your target audience as well as the current economic, political, and social climate. All of these factors change and shift with time, which is why market research is an ongoing endeavor.

Big Benefits Of Market Research

A grand part of any marketing strategy is the market research behind the plans. Many companies hire out professional researchers to investigate the latest statistics concerning their industry and target audience. The only way to offer your audience exactly what they are looking for, and thus increase sales, is to find out through research what they want.

A simple statistic can change your entire focus when it comes to planning a new strategy. For instance, if you are thinking about sending out a long-winded email to your customers to tell them about an upcoming sale, these two statistics might change your mind.

• 65% of the people receiving your email are visual learners. Without an image or some sort of visual display, the long-drawn out words might lead them to miss the part about the sale altogether.
• The brain is able to process visual information 60,000 times faster than text.

If people can’t quickly gather what your email has to offer they will be on to the next thing in their inbox.

Imagine what statistics could reveal about your specific target audience! Knowledge is power, and when you know your customer-base you can offer them exactly what they want—a win-win for all.

3 Quick Tips For Successful Marketing Strategies

1. Detailed Business Objectives

Does your business want to grow, or are you having trouble converting sales? Your goal might be to expand your business, but this goal is way too broad to successfully attain alone. Instead you need to create a more detailed goal, with a clear set of action to achieve it. Your business will have many different goals, and so each goal needs to be addressed individually in regards to how you can achieve it. Bit by bit, all of these smaller goals add up to expand your business and overall success.

2. Don’t Just Sell, Inspire

Your strategies are not just about selling your product or service, instead you must engage with your audience in a whole new way. You want to inspire consumers to act, participate, and join in on what you have going on. When creating your strategies it is important to keep this in mind. This goes back to market research and knowing your target audience, this knowledge is imperative to successfully reaching out and inspiring the right group of people.

3. Trial and Error

You can’t be so afraid to fail that you are unwilling to take chances. As the saying goes, the safe boat never gets far from shore. Companies have to make calculated risks in many areas, including marketing campaigns, in order to shake up the competition. If you play it safe and plan to stick with the same-type campaigns others in your industry are using, you may stay afloat but you aren’t likely to get ahead.