Crafting an effective marketing strategy takes a significant amount of planning and consideration—and for good reason. With all the daily emails, notifications, posts, and billboards your customers see, you have a great deal of competition for their attention. Your marketing needs to be precise and deliberate to make an impact, so a marketing strategy is crucial.
It’s easy to get lost in the details, so here are a few things to think about when it comes to your marketing strategy—
- Your business goals
- Your SEO strategy
- Getting creative with the channels you use
What Is a Marketing Strategy?
You’ve probably discovered that posting sporadically on LinkedIn and Instagram isn’t cutting it in today’s market. You need an effective marketing strategy, and you needed it yesterday.
So, what is a marketing strategy? A marketing strategy is your business’s long-term plan to reach specific milestones and goals. It’s a multifaceted approach to bring awareness to your brand, including your target audience, product, key messaging, and other high-level considerations.
It’s a big job, but a little planning can bring in new customers and allow you to monitor your success and pivot if circumstances change. Big bonus—you get the luxury of not breaking out in a cold sweat when someone mentions marketing.
Marketing strategies usually include the following considerations—
- Marketing goals and objectives
- Your target market and buyer persona(s)
- Messaging that speaks to your market
- Budgeting
- Channels that will reach your market
- Tools for measuring success
If you’ve already incorporated these into your marketing strategy, chances are you’ve got a marketing strategy that will take you far! Below are more ways to keep your approach fresh, holistic, and relevant.
Dress (Your Marketing Strategy) for Success
It’s easy to get caught up in the latest marketing trend or follow advice from a colleague—and while that’s not a flawed approach, it means your marketing strategy is stylish rather than tailored to your specific needs.
While we all want to dress to impress, sometimes the fashionable and trendy ideas aren’t going to resonate with your audience.
Instead, you should craft your marketing goals around your business goals. For example, if your business aims to increase revenue by 20%, try to find marketing strategies to increase qualified leads and conversion rates.
Ask yourself—
- How do we want to see our business grow? Where do we want to be in the next year or two?
- What areas do we struggle in? What business problems do we face?
- What is the competition doing? What strategies are they using, and how do we set ourselves apart?
Working backward will keep you focused on the whole picture instead of spiraling over the minute details and the dizzying number of trends and approaches out there.
Give Your Website a Little Love
As of September 2022, there are over 1.98 billion websites on the internet. Studies show that more than half of all traffic is directed at the top three results on the first page of results. Very few people visit the second page of the results, and the third page is on the brink of becoming a ghost town.
In other words, if your customers can’t find you on the first page of Google—or any other search engine—it’s as if you don’t exist.
Search engine optimization (SEO) enhances your website so that users can see it. SEO utilizes the search engine’s algorithm and popular keywords to boost your site on the results page so that you are more likely to be found by your target market.
Build SEO into your overall marketing strategy—especially if your website has been feeling neglected in the last few years. Search engine algorithms change constantly, therefore, you can almost always improve your SEO.
Even if your SEO game is strong, consider giving your website a makeover anyway. Your website should be eye-catching, user-friendly, and compelling.
Here’s how you make that happen—
- Load your website with content that is useful to visitors. Consider what questions your target market needs answered and build content around those questions.
- Utilize high-ranking keywords in your content. Do your homework to figure out which keywords have a high volume of searches. Use these words in your content to boost your ranking on the search results page.
- Optimize your website for mobile use. As of November 2022, 59.5% of all traffic on the internet is from mobile devices, so make sure your site works on a cell phone as well as it does on a computer.
- Simplify your site’s navigation. Make it easy for users to find the information they need.
Don’t Shy Away From an Unorthodox Idea
Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, launched the wildly-popular social news website with a marketing budget of $500.
You read that right. $500. It gets better—he spent all of it on stickers.
“Yes, stickers: the soundest investment I ever made,” Ohanian writes in Fast Company Magazine. “I used to travel around the country a lot… and everywhere I went I took stickers with me. I put them on signs, poles, and even other advertisements.”
You don’t have to use stickers like Ohanian did, but you do have to think creatively. There are many tried-and-true—and perhaps overused—marketing tactics to include in your strategy, but don’t let that scare you away from new and out-of-the-box ideas that come your way. Consider adding them to your existing strategy alongside more commonly used methods for a balanced but imaginative strategy.
Maybe this means trying your hand at a social media platform your industry traditionally doesn’t utilize—hello, plumbers of TikTok! It might mean trying to cook up some interest with an online challenge or contest. The internet is full of ideas that may work for your audience—and new audiences—unorthodox though they might be.
Bottom line—do something different and break the mold! Being surprising and authentic are the best ways to have people remember your name, engage with your content, and come back for more.
Ask for Help!
At Jennasis & Associates, marketing is our bread and butter. If crafting a marketing strategy is overwhelming—or your existing marketing strategy needs a fresh set of eyes—you don’t have to go it alone. Let us help!
We’re happy to offer our expertise so that you can grow your business—email us at digitalmarketing@jennasisassociates.com to get started.
