So, the concept of your business is fantastic. You’ve invested a lot of time and money into creating it. However, you don’t understand why the sales aren’t taking off? The answer lies in this blog.
Do your potential customers at least know that you exist? Do you have a marketing strategy in place?
Marketing is the analysis of consumers’ needs and includes all of the actions and techniques used to design an offer that meets their needs and influences their behavior. Any business, regardless of its size, industry and the products or services it offers, must develop its marketing strategy. Do you want to boost your sales, attract new customers or develop a new range of products? Whatever your goal, an effective marketing strategy is essential to be successful and avoid going out of business.
What is Marketing Strategy?
Marketing strategy is a plan of action that enables a business to achieve its short and long term marketing and business goals. Thanks to an effective product marketing strategy, your company will develop its reputation, target prospects likely to buy your products or services, understand their needs in order to transform them into customers. Later on, it retains your clientele to increase sales and your turnover.
The marketing strategy is part of your business strategy. It can apply to a new product launch in the market, to a family of products or your company’s entire offering.
Without a good marketing strategy, you risk wasting money and time in poorly targeted or ineffective marketing techniques.
How to Create an Effective Marketing Strategy?
Follow these steps to develop your marketing strategy.
1. Define your marketing goals
This is the basis: you won’t get anywhere if you don’t define clearly and precisely where you want to go. Set realistic goals. These may be volume objectives like increasing your turnover by 20% within a year. Or these can be the penetration objectives like making your products and services known to new customers. Apart from the above two, the goals can also be profitability objectives such as making a margin of X% on a particular product.
To help you, use the SMART method:
S for Specific and Simple
M for Measurable
A for Acceptable and Ambitious
R for Achievable
T for Temporarily defined
Marketing goals are directly linked to your business goals. They must also be clear and precise in order to allow you to develop an appropriate and effective action plan.
Some examples of marketing objectives:
Increase the conversion rate of your website by 20%;
Boost sales by 30% before the end of the year;
2. Analyze your Market
You must know the market in which you are positioned and always follow its evolution to offer a relevant offer. Collect all the necessary information on its size, growth, the latest trends, socio-demographic criteria (age, socio-professional categories, sex, etc.) as well as the motivations and purchasing behavior of consumers.
Analyzing and knowing your market helps you not only target your ideal consumer but also identify new business opportunities and improve your business performance.
3. Establish your action plan
Today, the rise of the Internet and easier access to information have made consumers more and more demanding and versatile. It can be a real challenge to successfully engage them and then convert them into customers. You need to use the right channels (email, website, blog, social networks, search engines, etc.) and the appropriate marketing techniques (direct marketing, influencer marketing, product marketing agency, etc.).
Finally, don’t forget to define the total budget for your marketing strategy as well as the precise budget you want to allocate to each action.
Last Step: Test, Control and Adjust
Ideally, start by testing your marketing action plan on a small scale to observe the attitude of prospects and see if everything is working as expected. Then, it is essential to measure the results obtained to realize its effectiveness. To do this, use performance indicators (or KPIs for Key Performance Indicator ) such as the click-through rate or the conversion rate. Finally, feel free to adjust or modify your strategy to achieve better results and stay relevant in the face of market changes.
Conclusion
A marketing strategy is essential to ensure the success of your business. By following these steps, you now have all the cards in hand to develop your marketing strategy and achieve your goals.
