Think about how many times in a single day you have seen an advertisement for something. It could be for a product, service, experience, or all of the above. If a company isn’t marketing, how would someone know about them? Marketing is all around us and essential to any type of business, big or small. Relying on word of mouth isn’t enough if you want your company to grow. If you want your business to be successful, you need to take the time to develop a strong business marketing strategy.
What is a Business Marketing Strategy?
A business marketing strategy is simply a plan or outline of how you want to approach your marketing without wasting your time or money. It’s hard enough running a business. With a good marketing strategy in place, you can focus on the day-to-day of your company. A good marketing strategy will outline how to turn leads into sales from your advertising and branding efforts. This can take some time and research since not every company offers the same things, advertises on the same mediums, doesn’t have the same competitors, and many more factors.
While creating a marketing strategy, be clear, realistic, and work with other people within your company so your strategy can be as efficient and reliable as possible.
In this guide, we will walk you through how to create a business marketing strategy for your company in 5 simple steps.
1. Define Your Company Visions and Goals
Think about where your company is and where you want it to be in 3 years. That can seem like a long time away, but it’s necessary to set a vision for what the perfect version of your company looks like so you can start setting goals to get there. If you already have a business plan set in place, use that to help determine your company visions and goals.
Do you want to increase your brand presence online? You can plan to have a daily posting schedule for your social media in 2 months, to have PPC campaigns running in four months, and have your website evaluated and reworked for SEO optimization in 8 months.
All that is important is that you have a general time frame and a specific outline of where you want your company to be or how you want your company to grow over the course of the next few years. The time frames for your goals will help keep yourself and others on track. Make sure to re-evaluate your goals about every six months so you can make necessary changes and measure your results.
2. Identify Your Ideal Target Audience
Your marketing won’t be effective if you don’t know who you are marketing to. What type of person is going to be most likely to buy your products or services?
It helps to start with some of the common things that marketers can track and utilize on platforms. Google Ads (and most platforms) allow you to show your ads to people who fit certain demographics. How old is your ideal customer or current customer base? What gender are they? Do they have similar household incomes or does it vary? Where do they live or travel to?
Let’s say you are running ads for your company that sells jet skis. Your ideal target audience would probably look like an upper-middle-class person in their 30s. You probably wouldn’t target younger customers as much since they may not have the savings or income to afford a jet ski yet. Your audience would probably be searching and have interests in swimming, the outdoors, and other adventurous activities.
You can get a lot more in-depth with online advertising when trying to determine who to show your ads to, so make sure to be as specific as possible when planning. Think about what things your customers would be searching for, what their interests are, what jobs they have, different trends they may be following, anything you can come up with. The more people your ads can appeal to, the better.
Now that you have an ideal target audience, you will be able to create marketing materials with a clear definition of your audience ready to be used by your team.
3. Select the Appropriate Marketing Tools and Materials
Before you start this step, make sure you have a budget in mind. There are lots of free tools and programs you can use for marketing. You can also take advantage of various paid programs, run PPC campaigns, hire someone for a website rebuild, create printing material, and much more. Once you know what you want to spend, you can start looking at what marketing tools and materials you will need to use.
Regardless of your budget, every company should set up social media accounts. They are free, easy to use, and a great way to improve your online presence, SEO, and customer relations. Social media is essential to every company’s marketing. You can also choose to advertise on various social media platforms. Social media campaigns can get more people to your website, increase leads and sales, drive app installs, help direct people to a store location, and more.
You may also want to consider print material for your marketing needs. You could utilize magazines for your waiting room to increase your brand presence and professionalism. Or you could send out postcards to customers that haven’t made a purchase from your website recently. There are many more print options to explore for your marketing needs like books, brochures, catalogs, and letters.
Take a look back at your marketing goals and determine what materials or platforms you will need to achieve them. Whether it be blog posts, podcasts, mailers, email campaigns, or any other marketing strategy, you need to have a clear plan in place.
4. Identify Your Competitors
While marketing you need to think of what makes you stand out from similar companies around you. Why should a consumer choose you over someone else? To answer this question, competitors need to be taken into account when developing your business marketing strategy. Think about your competitors when creating advertisements. Highlight offers or benefits they don’t have and set yourself apart by being unique and finding your own brand voice.
You can also look at your competitors to identify what marketing tactics they are using. Chances are they aren’t just throwing away money at unsuccessful marketing, so you can look at what they are doing right and wrong and apply some tactics to your marketing strategy.
If competitors have been around longer than your company, you may be able to pick up on different trends like they are sending more postcards in the summer and focusing on their social media accounts more during the winter. You could counter what they are doing and try to get audiences when they are advertising less or you could follow them to see if similar marketing tactics work for you.
5. Put Your Plan Into Action!
Now that you’ve clearly defined your company goals, identified your target audiences, selected the right materials, and identified your competitors, it’s time to put your plan into action. Your plan will help you follow a basic timeframe for how your strategy will be executed.
However, the work doesn’t stop there. Even once you have a business marketing strategy in place, you can’t just let it sit. Update your content regularly and always test your ads/content to see if you can create better versions of them. A/B testing is very easy to do and allows you to slowly test out different variations of your ads until they can be the best ad possible.
Marketing is constantly changing and evolving, to the point that it can be difficult to keep track of the current trends and the best marketing strategies. Luckily, Walker360 is here to help. Located in Montgomery, Alabama, Walker360 is dedicated to making your business the best it can be. Most print companies focus just on the print media, but at Walker360 we offer a wide variety of marketing tools and strategies to help you succeed.
From print media to digital services to direct mail and variable data, we’ve got you covered. Reach out today to learn more about how we can help you develop or improve your business marketing strategy.
