You can only start to market your business and products effectively when you have a marketing strategy in place to do so. This might seem a daunting task.
However, when you have a marketing strategy template to guide your progress, your small business success is only a few steps away.
So, let’s get started!
Follow our 5-step process to develop a marketing strategy template that will work for your business.
What is a Marketing Strategy?
Your marketing strategy is an explanation of the goals you need to achieve with your marketing efforts. It’s the overall position your business will adopt in the market.
Each marketing tactic you use should be 100% focused on reaching and surpassing these strategic marketing objectives.
Developing a marketing strategy template can help you define and revise your strategy overtime.
A marketing strategy involves choosing realistic, measurable and ambitious marketing objectives that you think your business can achieve on a sustainable basis.
When developing a marketing strategy, you need to define your marketing goals, such as growing inbound web visits, capturing leads or increasing sales.
Make sure your marketing goals and business goals align.
Typically, SMEs business goals will include some or all of the following:
- Grow market share.
- Increase sales.
- Increase transaction size.
- Launch new products or services.
- Increase frequency of purchase.
- Build brand awareness.
- Increase profit.
A simple SWOT analysis is a great start to creating your marketing strategy.
It creates a grid for you to work from.
Strengths:
- What advantages does your business have?
- What do you do better than anyone else?
- What problem(s) do you solve?
Weaknesses:
- What could you improve?
- What factors lose you sales?
- What should you avoid?
Opportunities:
- What interesting trends are you aware of?
- How can technology provide you with new opportunities?
- What good opportunities can you spot?
Threats:
- What barriers to entry do you face?
- What are your competitors doing?
- Do you have debt or cash-flow problems?
One of the core components of a good marketing strategy template is focusing on your consumer and his or her specific needs. And we’ve got the perfect blog post to help you do just that. Take a look here.
Not all consumers are created equal; they don’t have the same needs and desires.
We’ve put together a Target Market Assessment Tool, based on 12 years of experience in helping small businesses grow.
Use this tool below to identify segments or groups with similar needs so that your marketing efforts can be targeted to them.
While market segmentation focuses on consumers as individuals, market research takes a broader view of potential consumers to include market sizes and trends.
Market research should also include an analysis of your competition, so you know where your business stands in the overall marketplace.
Use market research to map your consumer markets’ perceptions of competing brands in relation to attributes they consider important in determining value.
You can then see major threats to your brand as well as the different directions in which they could move.
There are no single set of steps in a market research procedure that is accepted by everyone.
However, four major activities should be performed:
- Making a preliminary investigation. You need to determine the purpose and scope of your research. Then become comfortable in the problem setting by launching an unstructured search of the marketing environment. In order to clearly identify the problem you need to create a set of research questions.
- Creating the research design. This is the plan proposed to test the research questions. Determine the types of data needed. Locate the sources and choose your method of collecting the data.
- Planning the sample. Use a small part of the population to make up your sample. They must be representative of your segmented audience. Now, from this sample, gather the facts to be used in solving your problem. Data has now been collected.
- Processing the data. Now you must convert the collected data into a format that will suggest answers to the initially identified problem.
- Formulate a conclusion. Interpret the information and draw a conclusion.
The last step to building a marketing strategy template is to find your Unique Selling Proposition (USP).
Securing a major and distinct competitive advantage over other players in your market requires a differentiation of offer that will be sure to lure customers away from your competition.
Think about how you’ll position your product/service as offering a unique benefit, one not provided by your competition.
You must incorporate your USP into everything you do. Possible USPs include:
- Broadest choices or best selection of products/services.
- Lowest price.
- Highest quality.
- Exclusivity.
- Keeping your promises.
- Be Transparent. Explain how and why you do things.
Extend your USP by frequently offering promotions and specials to existing clients.
Everyone wants to know they’re appreciated and acknowledged.
You need to find the benefit to your customer only you can provide. Your uniqueness must be relevant to your customer as well as beneficial to your business. Educate prospects to appreciate and seize your provided advantage.
For example, what makes your coffee shop unique is its wide variety of wholesale beans, each with its own history depicted on your shop walls.
Conclusion: Your Turn to Build Your Own Marketing Strategy Template
Summarise your market’s position and goals, understand your business strengths and weaknesses and identify your target market.
After these three steps are completed, you need to delve deeper into your competition and research your position within the market.
Lastly, determine what makes your business unique.
After you’ve completed this 5-step process you should be able to develop your marketing strategy template.
You’ll be able to see where a need for your product or service exists, what you competition is doing to fulfil that particular need and what you can do to differentiate yourself from the competition.
to read the full article, click here