Five Steps to Creating a Successful Marketing Strategy

When it comes to your business, ensuring that you have the best marketing strategy is vital your success and growth. However, knowing where to turn for your marketing strategy can be a bit frustrating. Understanding the top marketing strategies will maximize your potential for high ROIs on your marketing campaign. Here are five steps to creating a successful marketing strategy that every business should implement.

Number One: Evaluate your current state

There is a proverb that states that the blind cannot lead the blind. As a leader, you must understand your company’s current situation. Doing a situation analysis will give you the insight on the strengths and weaknesses of your company. Pinpointing your strengths and weaknesses will be a comparison of your business to that of the competitors. When conducting your evaluation include your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Note that strengths and weaknesses are those factors which are within your company while opportunities and threats are external components.

Number Two: Know the market

While it may be idealistic to offer your product or services to the largest demographic in your geographic, the reality may be that your product or service may not be suited to that audience. For example, if you are trying to sell retirement plans, you need to target an audience which has time to invest capital and not those who are at a retirement age (as the time to invest has passed). Know your target audience and cater your marketing campaign to that audience. Should you need help in determining your target audience, it’s suggested that you perform some beta testing of your product or services to hone in on the right sector. If you are going to be selling a lot of your products to people who are walking past your business, then Luminati have some great displays available.

Number Three: Plan for more than one platform

One of the fundamental issues with many business’s marketing campaign strategies is that they focus on only one platform. This could be that they wish to do traditional marketing, social marketing, radio, or television marketing. Cross platform marketing should be a focus of any marketing campaign. Keep in mind that your target audience is apt to research your product or services online if presented in printed form. If the campaign is digital, then they will be more likely to try your product or services if the business is presented on television, print, or the radio. If you want a successful marketing strategy, you must include more than one platform.

Number Four: Have your brand defined before you start marketing

If you have a business and are planning to build your brand through your product, you may find it a hard uphill battle. Establish the fundamentals of your business and build the brand first. Understand what your products and services encompass. Have a definitive mission statement, a logo, a web presence, testimonials from actual customers. When you have a defined branding, your marketing strategy will fall into place a whole lot easier. This is because you will not spend time and capital on trying to figure out the direction of the company, the branding, and other assets of the business which define who you are. The brand will do that and so you can focus on what is important, building your client list and securing leads.

Number Five: Have a leader, not a strategist

The best marketing strategy is to have a leader in charge of the campaign, not just a strategist. A strategist may have the knowledge to plan, but if that person cannot inspire others to follow that strategy, then it is a feudal effort. You can only go so far with a plan, you have to have a professional that can put that plan into practice with proven results. To quote John C. Maxwell, author of The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, “You can find smart, talented, successful people who are able to go only so far because of the limitations of their leadership.” Find a successful leader in marketing strategies and you will find someone who not only can plan, but can inspire your team to follow the marketing strategy.