It’s time to update your marketing strategy for the New Year! Ensuring that you have a strong marketing plan is essential to the success and growth of your business. Here are our top 5 tips for creating a targeted and effective business marketing plan.
1. Understand what your business needs
Defining your business can help you understand what it needs and how an effective marketing plan can help it grow. Entrepreneur notes that a great way to figure out your business’ needs is by conducting a situation analysis. A situation analysis, or “SWOT” analysis, asks you to make a list of your business’ Strengths and Weaknesses and identify any Opportunities and Threats.
This exercise will help you understand what gives your business value, identify opportunities that can increase profits, and prepare for potential threats to your business. You’ll discover your business needs in no time with this strategy.
2. Define your target audience
Determining your target audience is the key to a great marketing strategy. Forbes Magazine discusses this and the importance of working to understand them. Forbes states that, “you need to understand your target market, so you know where you can target them, how they behave, and what kind of interests they have.” Without knowing who your target audience is or identifying anything about them, you have no way to reach them and, inevitably, no consumers for your business.
Taking inventory of the characteristics you do know about your existing audience is the first step to figuring out who your target audience is. Once you have the demographic, you can begin creating your buyer personas. A buyer persona helps you empathize with one of your ideal clients so you can better anticipate their needs and pain points. They can include details like age, gender, and average wages.
3. Set your goals for the year
The Digital School of Marketing states that, “marketing objectives are responsible for guiding your team towards developing and executing the best ideas that will make your marketing goals a reality.” Some tips for goal-setting include:
- Be specific about your goal’s objectives.
- Be optimistic – set positive goals.
- Be realistic – don’t set unattainable goals.
- Choose measurable goals.
This last tip is worth elaborating. It is helpful to select measurable short-term and long-term goals for your business so you can determine whether or not you’ve met them.. One common way companies measure success is by analyzing their market data. When you track your business’s marketing performance, you can see how customers are interacting with your products and how effective your marketing strategy is.
4. Plan out your tactics
Planning out your marketing tactics is an important step in figuring out how you’re going to execute your marketing strategy throughout the year. Entrepreneur recommends researching various marketing tactics to reach various markets and prospects. Some great tactics include:
- Advertising and direct marketing for your cold prospects.
- Loyalty programs and customer appreciation for your warm prospects.
- Marketing ads and interpersonal sales contact for your hottest prospects.
Once you’ve figured out which ones are going to work best for your business, you can create a marketing outline.
5. Set a budget
Marketing costs money. Ensuring that your marketing is both persuasive and cost-effective is pertinent to the overall success of your business. You need to spend money to make money, but you want to make sure that you don’t spend too much. In order to determine your marketing budget, you’ll need to figure out the index of money that you have for marketing and how much each of your tactics and other marketing resources will cost.
Having a strong marketing strategy is the key to your business’ success. Contact us today to discuss our various marketing services!
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