If your business does not have a fully comprehensive marketing strategy, then any marketing material that you post out will be incoherent and random. You may get a few extra sales based on the effectiveness of a certain piece of material, but it is not a long-term strategy designed to boost brand awareness and drive sales up for the long haul.
A proper marketing strategy is very important and will help you identify your key customers and how to communicate with them, monitor the competition, and create better and more targeting marketing material going forward. If you do not have a marketing strategy, it is about time you invested in one, as you are already probably losing out to your competitors.
Develop Your Brand
Before you start creating any marketing material, you need a core or a backbone to hang all the pieces off. This is your brand. A brand is much more than a simple logo. It is a whole philosophical foundation for your company. It is the reason you are in business.
It is the way you want to help people in the world, it is about your core values, your ethics and company culture. Without a solid foundation from which to create key messages on your marketing material, all your content will be disparate and unconnected. You need to create a solid brand which people can identify with and recognize. The brand underpins your entire company and is consistent across all platforms.
You need a brand narrative that can be read on your website, for example. It is great if this can include an interesting creating story such as you saw someone struggling with something and knew the world needed your company to help them in this regard, etc. Be as creative as you like. However, remember you have a key audience to connect with, so ensure that all your messages actually correspond with what they believe.
Watch the Competition
As part of your strategy, you need to keep a keen eye on the competition. You should do more than just click onto their website and social media pages to see what they are up to. You should investigate the effectiveness of their posts, discover how their posts align with the brand philosophy.
Look at the language they use and ensure you read the comments from their customers, your potential customers. The more insights and analytical information you can gain from the competition, the better your marketing material will be going forward. Why not invest in some competitive analysis software which can help you compare your campaigns against theirs.
Discover more about the SEO (search engine optimization) techniques they utilize, and find out which posts have had the best reach. It may also be a good idea to buy some of their products and so a little reverse engineering. There are an awful lot of ways you can use the data you can gather from your competitor’s marketing material and improve your own.
It may also be advantageous to look at some of the best companies out there and look at how they communicate via social media. What are their core messages? How do they get a message across? Look at the images and video they leave and the way they communicate with customers who leave comments. You cannot know too much. Everything will enahbceyour own marektingn material.
Add Value
If you want the customer to feel valued by your brand you need to take notice of their thoughts and opinion. You can add value to people’s lives by listening to what they have to say and creating marketing material that adds value to your customers’ lives. Value can be added in a variety of different ways.
By focusing on a problem, you are solving, having ethical and environmentally friendly processes in place, offering the right kind of support in many fields, etc. If you can make a customer feel valued by you, they are more likely to remain a customer and recommend your brand to their friend and family, among others. They are likely to give food reviews and become somewhat of a brand ambassador.
Build Up Relationships
A marketing strategy does not just focus on generating as many sales as possible. It is about creating brand awareness as developing relationships with customers that can last for a long time. This is built on brand preferences and brand awareness, creating loyal customers who trust you and become brand ambassadors.
A great way to achieve this is through the use of social media. With social media, businesses have access to customers like they never had before.v they can chat colloquially and advise and engage with them in any way they see fit. It is clearly best to respond to comments and messages as quickly as possible to build rapport and every, message you send need to demonstrate something positive about your brand – even if they are complaining.
You can shop customers that you do actually care about them and their thoughts and feelings by using social media in a way that was simply impossible to do before. Once you know more about your customer by building these bridges, you can reach out to them in more and more targeted ways.
KPI’s
If you want to monitor the effectiveness of any given piece of marketing, then you need to develop goals and set up some KPI’s (key performance indicators).
It does not matter how good your marketing may be, if you do not know how to track it and learn from the data, you are not going to improve. KPI’s allow you to build on that marketing material that actually works and stops you from wasting time and effort in areas that are less effective.
By using analytical tools, you can garner a lot of useful information o how to improve your strategy and hone your marketing team. If you are new to the marketing game, then it may be an idea to hire a digital marketing agency that can help you create a focused strategy with appropriate goals for your needs.
