Your Marketing Strategy

Your marketing strategy

Back to basics

Back to Basics

Let’s start right at the beginning of the marketing process and get back to basics – your marketing strategy. A clear and focussed marketing strategy is vital for any business and should fundamentally outline how the products and services you provide meet your customer needs and how long term and profitable relationships will be developed. Your marketing strategy should cover the following core areas: • How your marketing strategy will support your overall business objectives • A definition of your target markets – what, where? • A definition of your customers and their ‘needs’ – who, why, what? • An idea of your customer segmentation or ‘groups’ • How you will address their needs – what is your proposition for each group? • How you will do this more successfully than you competitors – what’s your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)? What are your key differentiators? • How you will you deliver your strategy – what marketing and sales tactics will you implement? • How will you measure success?

As with any strategy, it needs to be flexible enough to accommodate for changes in market or customer demand. Don’t be surprised that if throughout this process you identify new markets that you can target – more opportunity! We always recommend that when updating or creating your marketing strategy you implement a simple communications audit to understand what current perceptions are of your business with not only your customers, but with your suppliers, partners and employees. The overall purpose of having a marketing strategy is to determine specifically who you are targeting, pin point how you will your target and potential customers and what your proposition is to them. Read our other guides on how you can achieve the above and also more importantly, an area which is surprisingly not implemented by many businesses, how to measure the effectiveness of your marketing activities. Read our other guides in the range:...