If you’re looking to raise your brand awareness and increase sales, then you should consider ramping up your marketing activities.
While there are plenty of ways to improve your marketing strategy, there are some essential steps you should take to get the most out of your strategy.
Here are three simple steps you can take to improve your marketing strategy:
1. Identify your core product or service
If you’re already running a business, then you probably have a fair idea of what your product or service is.
But identifying the core belief or purpose behind your offering can be hugely beneficial, as shown by successful brands like Apple.
Bestselling author Simon Sinek developed the Golden Circle concept to illustrate this approach, creating a dart board with ‘why’ in the centre, ‘how’ in the next ring and ‘what’ in the outer ring.
The ‘why’ represents a brand’s core belief and why it exists; the ‘how’ refers to how the business meets that core idea; and the ‘what’ reflects what the company does to satisfy that core idea.
Start with why and consider what you want to achieve from your business beyond money, before moving to the outer rings to come up with a plan to deliver on it.
2. Define your audience
The next step is to define your target customer or niche to figure out how to market to them, and what they will love or hate about your product or service.
Start with a brainstorm session to understand what need your product or service fulfills, and who is most likely to be interested in using it.
You should also make a marketing persona, which is a fictional profile of someone who represents an actual customer.
Give your persona a name, age range, gender, location, job role, education level, family and work experience.
Then think about why they need your product or service, what problems your product or service solves for them, and why your persona would choose your product or service over a competitor’s.
3. Map out your marketing strategy
Now it’s time to pull all of those insights together and create a powerful marketing plan tailored to your business.
Begin by establishing big picture goals like increasing sales or awareness, along with more nuanced goals such as changing how people perceive your brand.
You can then start to develop more granular objectives such as SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound) goals so you can track your performance.
Run a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis of your business, looking at internal factors for strengths and weaknesses and external factors for opportunities and threats.
Remember to organise your marketing mix and consider how you can leverage activities off each other, such as encouraging newsletter subscribers to follow you on Facebook and Instagram.
Need help with your marketing strategy?
Your strategy should be tailored to your marketing needs, which is why we created our three-tiered approach that you can adapt to your own business.
The Three Fs of Marketing (Foundation, Fundamentals and Forefront) approach can help you develop an effective marketing strategy that’s right for your business.
However, if you need a hand designing a winning marketing strategy, then Assemblo can help.
Assemblo is a full-service marketing agency based in Melbourne, with a team of highly skilled marketing professionals experienced in developing successful marketing strategies for businesses and organisation of all sizes.
To find out more, just give us a call on (03) 9079 2555 or drop us a note via our contact form below.