by Katie Conroy
Image via Pexels
If marketing sounds like such a broad function that would require its own marketing department within your business, you may be pleasantly surprised to know that you can manage this function yourself. But whether that’s partly or completely, is up to you. Here’s a guide that can help you get started.
Defining your strategy
If you want to stay ahead of the competition, you’ll need to start with a concrete plan. Also, your marketing strategy will most probably need to be tweaked here and there as you go based on the results and feedback you receive. There are some tried-and-true tactics you can stick to. This may mean redefining your target audience, finding new ways to highlight your product or service, and getting to grips with what your consumers are really looking for and how you can meet those needs best.
What is your message?
Perhaps one of the most important considerations in marketing is deciding what it is you want to communicate with your marketing message. Moreover, establishing your marketing message is about conveying your core qualities or benefits that could be of the most value to your target audience. Even more than this is deciding how you want to communicate your message to its intended recipients. Of the two methods you’re likely to use, these could be offline or online marketing channels or a combination of both (also known as cross-channel strategies).
Examples of online marketing strategies that one could use to get the word out there include social media, email marketing, SEO, content marketing, online events, webinars, etc.
On the other hand, offline marketing strategies can include billboards, community bulletins, business cards, flyers, and radio advertising for example. However, you’ll need funding to afford this type of marketing campaign.
Aligning your marketing message and your channel
Of course, choosing the appropriate channel or channels for your message will depend on where your audience is along the sales funnel. In other words, it’s tailoring your message using your various channels to suit your consumer’s needs at the beginning, in the middle and at the very end using wider channels (i.e. blog posts) that narrow in (for i.e. email marketing) to persuade your potential customer to take action.
Determining the results
For a marketing strategy to be effective, it will need to have accomplished the marketing and or sales goals and objectives you set right at the start. This can be tested in a myriad of ways.
Analytics
Here, you’ll be analyzing the concrete facts regarding the analytical outcome of your marketing strategy. Tools such as Google Analytics or Hootsuite for example can give you an indication of how favorably people reacted to your marketing efforts.
Key performance indicators
Here, it’s about establishing your KPIs, whether it’s about growth, sales, conversion, or leads, and using tools like Salesforce to measure how far you were able to reach your goals.
In summary, marketing can be quite complex. And you may feel as though you’re in over your head at times. However, it’s not as complex as it might seem if you have the foundational knowledge of how marketing works from the ground up. Because once you know the basics, you can deploy a variety of the methods above to see what works for you. And it’s quite simple to do because you have the tools and resources at your fingertips to ensure your marketing efforts yield the results you envisioned at the beginning.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Content Strategy Alliance.