Is It Time to Update Your Marketing Strategy?

Like most strategies, your marketing strategy needs to be reevaluated periodically. This can be because you have reached your goals and now you need to set new ones, or because you have not reached your goals and you need to figure out why.

Who

Before you start marketing, you must figure out who you are marketing to. Use data collected by your sales team, your previous marketing strategy and if you have to do more research. Build a buyer persona, so with every campaign, you run you have a specific person in mind.

Goals

You need to know where you are going before you head out on the road. This is your business; not an awesome road trip you’re taking with friends.

What is it that you want to accomplish with your marketing plan? What problems need to be solved? Starting with your intended end is great practice.

Tools

Make sure you create a list of all of the marketing tools you have available. Social media, email, mailing list, paid marketing ads and word of mouth

Roadmap

Once you know where you’d like to end, start backward mapping how you will get there. A good marketing strategy is about 6-12 months long. Map out each month.

Evaluation

There must be milestones built in to check for efficiency. If your goal was to increase online sales by 20% this year, you cannot wait until the end of the year to realize your marketing strategy is not working. Look at your roadmap and build in some checkpoints that will tell you if you are on the right track.

Here are some new components you should consider when updating your marketing plan.

Marketing Partnerships: Find other companies that you can co-market with. If you are a caterer, find a DJ. You can tag each other in posts, create packages for booking both of you and tap into each other’s networks.

User-Generated Content: get your customers and clients to post for you. Ask them to show a picture of them using your product and tag your company in it. Run contests to see who can make the best art using or about your product.

Have Fun! If appropriate for your business, make people laugh. Laughter is extremely powerful.

Build Connection: Consider how to allow your customers to interact with each other. Can you create a Q&A forum on your website or use social media for quizzes.

Webinars: People like to learn! Consider your buyer persona. What is it they might want to learn about. Create a tutorial or information session. Can you give them a certificate at the end?

Share information related to your industry. Sharing articles in your posts or newsletters is a great way to build trust with your audience. You don’t always have to sell them something. But it is great to stay on their minds!

Have fun with videos. These can be how-tos, unwrapping videos, a day in the life videos or watch us remodel/design/create videos. Videos are popular

Check out Tik Tok. Even if your audience is not on Ti Tok, see what it is all about and use those ideas for your videos.

LinkedIn- This is an often underused site. People create their profiles when they are looking or work. and make connections and that could be the end of it. But it is for more than finding a job! Like Facebook, on LinkedIn, you should join groups, engage others in conversation and share content like blog posts that will bring people to your site.

The long and short of it is: effective marketing is about engaging customers. The onus of the sale is on the company to first provide something people want and then to engage with them through laughter, education, entertainment and authenticity to get them to see the value you have to offer.

You may have a great product, but if people do not feel connected to it, to you, they will never know.