You may have the absolute best product or service available, but if your target audience doesn’t know about it, it might as well not even exist.
Marketing is not a 'nice to have' but a vital and fundamental investment in the success of your business.
But, not all marketing is designed to achieve all goals and not all marketing channels and tactics are going to be the best match for your business.
The key is to be smart about where you invest your marketing time and dollars, and the first thing you need to do that is create your marketing strategy.
A great marketing strategy includes 4 key components:
1. Know your audience
There are some obvious top level metrics you have probably already thought of like am I targeting men or women? What country do I operate in? etc
To really know your audience though, you need to understand what motivates them, what specific problems you can solve for them and what their fears and desires are.
Armed with this information, you can really start to speak to your audience about what they care about and encourage them to seek you out for solutions.
2. Set specific goals
Every business I've ever spoken to leads with one goal - make more sales.
And, I totally get it. But every piece of marketing you do has set of micro goals that all work together to achieve the ultimate outcome of more sales.
Your goals need to be different (and realistic) for each piece of marketing you do.
If your looking to make sales quickly, Google Ads are your best bet. At any given time, only 3% of your potential customers will be looking to 'buy now', and 90% of them will head to Google. Your success metrics for Google Ads are typically sales or website conversions.
But, you should also be nurturing the other 97% of your potential customers who are not yet ready to buy. Social media is a great platform for this. Focus on building awareness and trust and measure success by looking at growth in reach (impressions), followers, engagement and social shares.
3. Develop a plan
Now you have an understanding of who your target audience is, what they care about and which marketing channels serve what purpose, you can create an execution plan.
Break this up into chunks of work so you can work through them methodically eg:
Be clear about who your target audience is, the problems you solve for them and how your different from competitors
Set up your Google Ads with relevant (and popular keywords) either within Google Ads or with free tools such as semrush
Create a social media schedule ahead of time with a mix of specific call to actions eg sign up for newsletter, request a free sample or trial etc
Create your social media posts and schedule them in advance so they can run on autopilot
4. Gather and measure results
This is crucial. If you don't know which markeitng activity or which markeitng messages are working, you don't know what to stop, start or keep and you'll quickly fall into a spiral of wasting both time and money.
Go back to your specific goals and measure the success (or lack of) over time. With this data driven insight, you can quickly change your tactics to ensure your marketing is delivering against your goals and working in harmony to help drive your ultimate goal of more sales.
It may feel counterproductive, but businesses who don't have a marketing plan in place rarely achieve the scalability or commercial success they crave. Take the time to plan in advance and be strategic with your marketing, it's then that you'll start to appreciate the difference smart marketing can have on your business.
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