Why Do You Need a Marketing Strategy?

Why do you need any form of strategy?

To get you from A to B effectively and with the right end result.

A marketing strategy is not just something that sounds good when you talk about it in a meeting, it is a key tool that when used properly will guide both you and your business in the key decisions that you make.

A marketing strategy gives you direction and enables you to measure your performance against your key objectives.

So here are some top tips that you need to think about when creating your marketing strategy…

End Result

This is the whole point of creating a marketing strategy in the first place, to move you from A to B and if you are not sure what A or B are you cannot possibly build the plan effectively. You need to have a clear idea as to what success looks like.

But we do not want any woolly statements like ‘We need more sales’ or ‘We need more customers’ that just will not cut it. You need to get specific, take sales as an example:

You want to improve sales – by how much, what is the % uplift? Across what time frame? On which product? To which customers?

SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely) is a great tool to use to help you focus on what your objectives are and helps to keep you realistic in terms of results and time frames.

Do your research and understand your customer

If you do not understand who it is that you are talking to or targeting with your marketing strategy, then how can you possibly deliver the results that you need? You need to have a clear profile of who your customer is so that you can use the right marketing activity to reach them and deliver to them the right message which will convert.

By profile we mean thinking about what kind of person they are, what is their name, how old are they, do they have a family, where do they live, what do they like to do in their spare time, which social media channels do they use? Start to build up a picture of that person so that you can ‘stand in their shoes’ when thinking about marketing messages and how to reach them. In a B2B scenario do not forget, that person does not switch off from work the minute they get home, you can still reach them on a personal as well as professional level.

Do not forget who you are

It can be too easy when chasing an increase in sales to forget what your brand and business stands for. The implementation of your strategy should be through your brand personality to ensure you remain authentic to your target customer. For example, if you are a small accountancy firm do not pretend to be the worlds best just to get more sales in, it will not appear genuine and it will not resonate with your target customer.

Think about your Superheroes

We believe there are six stages to consider within every marketing strategy and that is why we call them our Superheroes. The Superheroes will help you to think about your messages at every stage and using your customer profiles you can think about which marketing activity to use to reach your customer at each stage too.

The six key stages to think about are:

  • Awareness – you need to be on your target customer’s shopping list
  • Interest – once they are aware of your business how can they find out more about you?
  • Evaluation – they need to know whether you are as good as you say you are
  • Trial – how could you get them to sample your product or service to help get the sale across the line?
  • Adoption – they have become a customer, what would be your welcome process?
  • Loyalty – how are you going to keep them as a customer to deliver you the long-term value?

If you have an accountant, they should be your first stop for business advice. If you don’t have an accountant or they can’t help, BuBul has a wide range of experts available. For help with your marketing strategy, contact our expert* Mike on LinkedIn.

*We’ve picked experts we know and trust who are good at what they do. All of them will give you at least an extra 30 minutes free advice if you contact them and would then charge their normal prices. They don’t pay to be on BuBul and don’t give us any money from anything they earn as an expert.