How I approach a Marketing Strategy - Part One!

Every time I meet a new client I get very excited about how we can improve their marketing, whether it’s just social media marketing, a direct marketing campaign or a wider marketing strategy. Everyone, especially the clients, have their own ideas, but I tend to always approach the strategy in the same way.
 
It’s not anything unconventional. My mystic ways of the marketing strategy are pretty standard marketing practice, straight from the grubby classrooms of Oxford Brookes when I was doing my CIM diploma, but sometimes when you know your business too well or you feel like you’ve done it all before it can be very easy to overlook these few key areas.
 
Your Target Market
You know, the people you want to buy your product or service. Every business knows who they want to buy their product, but they might not know enough statistics and information to really pin their demographic down.
 
How many people are there in your target market? Is there a specific age group? Where do they live, where do they shop, where do they communicate with friends and how do they get their information? It feels like too much for smaller businesses to handle, but happily with a bit of research and analysis it’s really easy to build a comprehensive picture of who would like to spend their money with you.
 
Your Message
Marketing a small business with a coherent message can be hard. If there is more than one person involved in getting communication out, even if there are just two separate offices or directors or a mix of shareholders; what your target market sees from your website, blog, social media post, email campaign or advertising can be very different.
 
You need to ensure that whatever you are promoting, your message is the same without. The same values, ways of referring to things, punctuation… This does of course depend very much on how you are marketing yourselves (if you are a small team of eccentric artists passionate about your own agendas within the same marketing channel, then yes that’s fine), but whatever you do, I’m sure you want to appear trustworthy and professional to any potential customers. And if all your marketing materials reads in the same way, with the same overall message, then you’re getting there with that one.
 
Your Channels
There’s a lot of ways you can market your business, but always a limited budget and not enough time. This is where knowing your market comes in. When you know WHO they are, you know WHERE they are, so you can focus your activities.
 
Take a look at all the possible ways you can reach your chosen sectors, which will be the most effective (look at what has worked well in the past), then how you can monitor your activity and what time you have.
 
This is going to be a long post so I’ll stop now and pick up on part 2 tomorrow (available now!), including your ACTIONS, your DEADLINES and your MONITORING. All the exciting bits. If you just simply can’t wait and want to see how this sort of marketing strategy can help your business, then you can talk to me today. Right now. Go for it.