How to Build a Marketing Strategy : Marketing a small business can be a tough task. Many people find it hard to connect with their target audience, no matter what methods they use. This guide will help you understand the most effective marketing strategies and examples so far, along with advice on how to use them.
Having a well-documented marketing plan can greatly affect your success, whether you’re a budding startup or a well-established company. The issue? When you start to create your own marketing plan, you might feel overwhelmed by all the recommended practices and strategies.
So, to make this topic easier to understand, here’s a straightforward guide filled with wisdom from leading marketing gurus. We’ll only include what’s necessary for you to know—instead of a long list of strategies to experiment with.
What is a marketing strategy?
A marketing strategy is like a roadmap for a company to reach potential customers and convert them into loyal ones. If done correctly, a practical marketing strategy outlines your aims and goals, and includes your unique selling point, market research, target audience, messaging, and the top marketing channels your audience prefers.
An effective marketing strategy covers the 4 P’s of marketing:
- Price: This refers to how much your products will cost and the reasoning behind the pricing.
- Product: This is about the products you’ll offer and what makes them stand out from existing products in the market.
- Promotion: This is about how you’ll make your products visible to your target audience.
- Place: This is about where you’ll sell your products.
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How to build an effective marketing strategy
- Conduct Market Research
- Define Product-market fit
- Set Measurable marketing goals
- Explore marketing channels
- Think about retention marketing
- Set your marketing budgets
- Measure and fine-tune
1. Conduct Market Research:
Your target market is the group of people you aim to sell to. Understanding who they are and their experiences can help you connect with them. So, how do you identify your target audience? You can do this through both qualitative and quantitative research:
- Competitive Analysis: Dive deep into your competitors’ target audience. Which social media channels are they most active on? Which demographic does their brand voice resonate with the most? How do they describe their products?
- Website Analytics: Tools like Shopify Analytics and Google Analytics can provide further insights into your target audience’s demographic data.
- Research Interviews: Connect with a group of people who engage with your competitor on social media and interview them. Ask them about their purchase decisions, if the product met their needs, and what could make the product better.
- Surveys: Use a tool like Survey Monkey to ask questions about people’s interests, hobbies, location, income, and occupation.
- In-Person Conversations: Sometimes, meeting people in real life, like at a local farmers market or a street fair, is the best way to understand your audience. Casual conversations can provide valuable insights.
- Industry Research: Review research reports from sites like Nielsen, Forrester, or Pew Research on consumer behavior and marketing trends. Google Trends can also provide information on the popularity of different items over time.
- Purchase Information: Once you have some sales, analyze how much customers spend, where they’re buying from, and what they buy.
2. Define Product-Market Fit
When someone visits your website, how well do you explain the problem that your product solves? Shopify expert Ben Zettler suggests considering the following questions:
- What is the purpose of the products you sell?
- What problem does your product address? Are you filling a void in the market, improving on what your competitors offer, or meeting a critical need that hasn’t been addressed?
- Why should someone choose your product over a competitor’s? What makes your products superior?
This is the initial step in establishing a product-market fit for your business. While the best proof of your product-market fit is actual sales, this process will help you craft the messaging you’ll use on your website. This will be the main content on your homepage, product pages, and landing pages.
For instance, Equator Coffees established its product-market fit by producing excellent coffee and contributing positively to the global coffee community.
3. Set Measurable Marketing Goals:
Once you understand your audience and the values you want to share with potential customers, it’s time to set goals. This forms the base for any future marketing strategies or plans. It helps you avoid pursuing vanity goals and instead, create campaigns that align with your overall business objectives. Here, the SMART goal framework is useful. You’ll want to set marketing goals that are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
4. Explore Marketing Channels:
A marketing strategy involves using different tactics—like organic and paid marketing—across various channels like email, social media, or SMS. Let’s look at some of the most popular ones.
Social Media: Social media marketing is a highly effective marketing strategy for small businesses. It involves using social networks to promote and sell your products, services, and brand. Brands can use both unpaid (organic) and paid social media marketing tactics to boost online sales and raise awareness.
Popular social media platforms include:
- TikTok
- Snapchat
- X, formerly known as Twitter
Excelling in social media marketing is more than just promoting your brand—it’s about understanding, engaging, and responding to your audience and their world. In a space where many brands use social media as a platform to pitch their products, it’s beneficial to be one of the ones building a genuine connection with their audience and adding a bit of happiness to their daily lives.
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5. Consider Retention Marketing:
Keeping customers is often more cost-effective and simpler than acquiring new ones. Building long-term trust with both customers and non-customers through community outreach and word of mouth is what will keep them returning.
Targeted Email Marketing:
Once you have a customer’s information and they’ve made their first purchase, you can set up a post-purchase email sequence. This is your chance to offer a discount code for a future purchase, ask for feedback and reviews, and gather user-generated content.
You can set up automated email marketing campaigns to engage with existing customers and encourage them to make another purchase, such as:
- Transactional Emails: These are sent during checkout or other purchasing actions. They’re mostly functional, but they’re crucial for sending key shipping and order information to customers.
- Promotional Emails: These are designed to raise awareness and promote new products or deals. For instance, you could create a Black Friday Cyber Monday email sequence to send limited-time discounts during the shopping holiday.
- Lifecycle Emails: Also known as “triggered” emails, these are sent based on the actions a shopper takes and where they are in their customer lifecycle. For example, a cart abandonment email you send only after a customer leaves a product behind.
6. Set Your Marketing Budget:
A marketing budget is the amount you plan to spend on marketing activities. It doesn’t have to be large—some of the most innovative marketing ideas are incredibly cost-effective. Having a budget helps prevent overspending and allows you to measure return on investment. The average business spends about 10% of its annual revenue on marketing, but your budget can vary.
Brands with an aggressive advertising strategy might need a higher marketing budget, while new online stores might want to start with free tactics. Once you’ve determined your overall budget, distribute it among the marketing channels you plan to use. Most platforms have budgeting tools that show how far your money will go. For example, Facebook advertising shows how many people you can reach based on your daily budget.
7. Measure and Fine-Tune:
In the past, marketing often launched without enough tools to truly understand what was happening. This reminds us of advertiser John Wanamaker’s famous quote: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Digital marketing makes tracking results much easier. Conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, payback periods, user behavior—digital marketing provides a wealth of data that smart business owners can analyze for insights.
Internet marketing can be tested with a minimal budget and precise cut-offs, allowing you to keep costs low until you find a successful campaign. Then, you can quickly and aggressively scale your marketing efforts. You already know what works; you just need to do more of it. Similarly, you can monitor your marketing analytics to identify which campaigns are underperforming.
Before you turn off a poorly performing campaign, consider if there’s anything you can do to improve it. For example, if your marketing data shows that Facebook ads with social proof have high click-through rates, it makes sense to add customer reviews or user-generated content to campaigns that don’t already have them.
Benefits of a marketing strategy
Connect with Your Target Audience:
In today’s world, customers have a plethora of choices. With approximately 24 million online stores catering to every budget, preference, and value proposition, a marketing strategy can help you identify who you want to sell to and how you’ll get their attention.
Stand Out from the Competition:
The aim of your marketing strategy is to demonstrate how you’ll outperform the competition and maintain a competitive edge over time. Without a strategy, you might find yourself trying random tactics that don’t work together, wasting too much time and money on things that don’t result in sales, and losing customers to competitors.
Build a Consistent Brand:
A strong brand is what enables retailers to sell similar products at higher prices. This is only possible with a marketing strategy that helps people connect with who you are, what you sell, and what you stand for.
Take the exercise bike brand Peloton as an example. Thousands of retailers sell exercise bikes at a fraction of the cost, but Peloton stays in business because of the brand it has built. Fitness enthusiasts recognize it as the best product in its niche, which is why it can charge over $1,000 for a single piece of equipment.
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