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A marketing strategy is what you will use to promote your business. It is also referred to as a promotional plan or advertising campaign. Yours comes down to deciding if you want to focus on product-focused marketing, service-oriented marketing, targeted marketing, or broad market exposure.
There are many different types of marketers, but most have one thing in common — they are all about selling products!
As a seller of a product yourself, you must understand that spending time focusing on direct sales promotions and increasing overall inventory is not the best way to leverage the strength of being an entrepreneur.
Spending time promoting and growing your own personal brand takes up valuable resources. More than that, it can be hard to prioritize such efforts when your mental and physical energy is depleted from constant promotion.
Instead, find ways to improve your marketing strategies so that they emphasize building relationships and exposing your services to as many people possible. These strategies can include things like blogging, social media engagement, etc.
Marketing is more than just buying expensive toys to do tricks with. It is investing in tools to help grow your business. Product marketing tips are great, but there are much better ways to spend your money.
This does not need to be a very formal process, but it should include enough detail to make an effective test of the theory or hypothesis you have about how to improve your marketing strategies.
You do not want to simply throw together a bunch of things without thinking through what effects they will actually have.
When creating your strategy plan, think about why current practices are failing to produce results and then create new strategies based on those failures.
For example, if your marketing strategies have been focusing too much on social media sites, then maybe start developing your website more effectively by using better content and linking out to other pages and resources efficiently.
Or, if you’ve focused too heavily on direct advertisements, then develop ways to use indirect channels like blogs and articles to generate traffic instead.
The first step in doing a marketing strategy plan is making it something you can actually do, and something that will produce results. If you are not careful with this, your plan will be wasted!
Too many people make vague statements about changing their business or quitting their job without any concrete actions mentioned. I have seen too many success stories where the person gave up because they did nothing but talk about it.
You need to put in some effort into this before you start talking. This could be developing a new business model, finding yourself a new position, exploring different routes for exposure, etc.
Once you have done these things, then you can add them into your planning process.
If you want to see true growth, you must take active steps towards achieving your goal. You will never get anywhere if you only dream about it.
Even if you’ve done this before, do it again. Make sure your ideas are clear and understandable. This will help you focus more clearly on what tasks need to be done.
Once you have everything organized into sections, make sure that each section has an appropriate title. Use short, catchy titles to describe each section.
After all, you want people to know what they should be doing next!
Your marketing strategy plan is not meant to be very long- You can add onto it as needed throughout the year. Try creating a new version every six months to keep it fresh.
You may also find it helpful to use templates or tools to organize and track your plans. There are many free ones available online.
Now that you have done some of the hard work by defining your audience, creating messages and strategies for these audiences, and establishing milestones and deadlines, it’s time to review all of this information and organize it into an effective plan.
As we mentioned before, marketing plans are not one big, beautiful document with lots of pretty pictures. They are more like diary entries or journal articles that help you track and evaluate how well your strategy is working.
You can use this same article format to write your plan. First, choose a date at which you will update your plan- probably today! Then, start writing. As you gather new information, add it to what you already had written. When you are finished, take a few minutes to look over your plan and see where you left off.
A marketing strategy plan is an ongoing process that should be modified and adapted as your business changes or new opportunities arise. Don’t get stuck in a rut with what you have written before!
You don’t need to write a brand new piece each time, but you can add something new or refine what you already have.
Your marketing strategy plan will not look exactly the same from one month to the next, which is what makes it important to update it.
This way you are staying current with what is working and what isn’t for your company and yourself as a marketer.
If your colleagues and others have different ideas about how to achieve similar goals, then you may want to consider whether those goals are still valid for your company and yours as marketers.
Having this introduction done means that you are now ready to begin creating your strategy! Once you have the strategies organized into categories, you can start developing them.
Once you have all of your strategies written down, you can start organizing them into different groups or chapters. You can also take your time to reevaluate and reorganize these chapters as needed.
This is an important step in marketing because you will be able to easily return and revisit past strategies if need be. By doing this, you will keep yourself focused longer term.
You want to make sure that everything is completely organized before moving onto the next chapter or element. This way, you don’t waste any time trying to find what you left off working two weeks ago.
The first step in doing a marketing strategy plan is defining what success means to you. This could be having a high sales volume, having enough followers to make your business visible, or improving your advertising strategies.
You can measure your success via several different metrics and studies. Some of these include: online reviews, referrals, feedback from people that interact with you, etc.
By tracking these numbers, you will know if your changes worked and how well they impacted your business.
A few things about marketing strategies is that you will always have new ways to tweak, refine, or even start over. This comes not only from the need to test different versions of an approach, but because technology changes so quickly!
What worked two years ago may no longer work today. What works for your competitor may not be effective for yours. You can’t assume anything about how people will interact with your business in the future.
Testing is key!
Start by testing what seems to be working now and see where you can make tweaks. For example, one of our latest tips is actually free. We called it “The Best Ways To Promote Your Business Online (For No Money).”
Why is this important? Because you don’t want to spend money on online advertising when there are more efficient ways to do it.
Hopefully you learned something here too – spending money on ads doesn’t usually work very well. If it did though, we would tell you to just go buy some really expensive commercials haha.
So what are these budget-free methods? They’re probably familiar to most people already but maybe not everyone knows all of them.
