Every marketing agency has its own business secrets, and in this text we reveal to you one of our greatest, how we create a marketing strategy for our clients – step by step.
Who is the marketing strategy for?
For all of you who want an achievable plan for your business for the year that is ahead of us, we have prepared this guide to help you meet your business goals, regardless of the current situation that unfortunately affects us all.
As new marketing trends develop and as your business grows, the strategy itself changes and develops. Research shows that the increase in online sales was a result of businesses’ clear vision of their brand, a clear plan and a successful marketing strategy. Your business does not have to suffer the consequences of the new situation if you prepare well for the upcoming period and follow the steps and strategies we provide.
One of the impressions shared by many of our clients who get their marketing strategy is “Oh, why haven’t I seen this before”.
What benefits will you get from a marketing strategy?
The marketing strategy systematically shows the costs, communication channels, goals and steps you need to take in a precisely defined period (12 months at most) and helps you achieve the desired results more easily and precisely.
In addition, a clear marketing plan and strategy will:
- Give a clear insight into your target market. It will be easier for you to reach potential clients and customers when you know what characteristics they have in common and what problems they share.
- Help you create marketing messages that generate results. Your message should recognize the problems of the target group, take the pulse of the audience and offer a solution that only you can give them.
- Provide focus and the right direction. Email marketing, social media, Google advertising, blogs, direct communication with customers via chat bots – there are more and more choices when it comes to communication channels. A good plan involves selecting appropriate platforms for a particular branch of business and applying the best practices for each platform individually.
A strategy designed by a professional marketing team provides you with the concrete steps and tools needed to achieve the desired results. The goal is that as a business owner you have a concrete, clear and feasible action plan, so that the upcoming period will be successful, no matter what.
Systematic analysis
On the way to creating a marketing strategy, the first thing our team does is a comprehensive analysis of the current situation, which includes a thorough research of the following segments:
- Competition
- Target audience
- Keywords
- Hashtags
- Before / After grid (table of indicators of key transformation benefits that users achieve by using a particular product or service)
We will now briefly explain the items listed.
Competition research and analysis
Your competition is not only a challenge or an obstacle on your way to success, they are also your valuable resource. Once you know and understand what your competition is doing, it will be extremely helpful to determine the steps you need to take to be more successful.
You can get a lot of information from the competition analysis, but in practice, the following proved to be the most important for us.
Tip no. 1
Reading customer reviews on competitors’ social pages will give you an insight into what is desirable to do and what is not. And since there are a few business owners who want to dedicate time to what their customers say and therefore make changes, you can count on many of your competitors to continue making the same mistakes when it comes to running their business.
Tip no. 2
Analyze the three biggest competitors and create a list of their similarities and differences. Is there something they all do right or something everyone does badly?
Tip no. 3
The data collected from the previous steps will give you clear guidelines for thinking ahead to the next challenge. Define the key benefits that users receive from your product or service, and then track which competitor offers some of these benefits. This is a simple task that can reveal to you what your competitors have to offer, and based on that you can create a unique offer that will make you significantly different from the competition.
Who is your ideal customer?
Here are some guidelines to help you find your ideal customers:
- Define your product or service from a customers’ perspective. Find out how your product improves the life or work of your customers and what problem it solves.
- Define the ideal customer by determining their age, education, occupation, income, geographical location
- Identify the specific benefits that your customer is looking for when purchasing your product (what benefits are most important to your ideal customer and why should your customer buy from you and not from someone else?)
- Determine exactly where and when your ideal customer buys the product or service you offer. What has to happen in his life or work to buy your product? At what time of year, month or day does your customer buy? Why then?
- How does your customer buy your product or service? How has your customer bought similar products or services? How does your customer make the decision to buy your product?
- Finally, for all the answers to these questions, ask another “why?” and you will additionally understand your customer, his habits and preferences.
Keywords and hashtags
Keywords are an essential tool for creating content on your website. A keyword strategy determines which words or phrases users type into a search engine to find specific content. Therefore, the content on your website needs to be created according to keywords, and the content of the page and blog should strategically use targeted keywords to help users find the necessary information. Search engines read web pages to identify the most important information for the user – your keywords.
Hashtags are one or more words along with the # symbol in front. Their job is to make the placed content easier for users to search. Not every one of the social networks uses them, hashtags have never become popular on Facebook, while on the other hand they are often used by users on Twitter and Instagram.
So, the most important difference between these two terms is that keywords are read and analyzed by search engines or algorithms, while hashtags are much more used and interpreted by people.
Before / After grid
As mentioned earlier, this is a table of indicators of the key benefits that users acquire by using a particular product or service. Why do we need it?
People don’t buy products or services, they buy transformations. That is, the results. More precisely, they want to know what will happen “after” they use your product / service. This means that a good offer will provide the “after” state that the person wants. A good marketing team will be able to appropriately interpret the transformation of customers from the “before” state to the “after” state. It is not bad to emphasize once again that clarifying the desired outcome offered by the offer is of key importance for increasing sales.
What other elements does a marketing strategy include?
Value calculator (table showing the forecast future growth of all positive effects for the user and elimination of all problems that the user has within a certain time frame).
- Defining online communication channels
- Calendar of posts for each social network
- Defining content types by communication channels
- Defining campaign types according to communication channels
- Marketing automation for education, sales and lead generation process
The strategy also includes proposals for:
- types of posts on social media
- blog topics
- topics for lead magnets (lead generation)
- the tools needed to enable and speed up the whole process
Finally, we enclose a list of all premium strategy schemes that we create if clients need a higher level of marketing automation:
- Leadgeneration
- User / customer classification
- Email communication at different levels
- B2B sales
- Up sell / cross sell
- Infinite newsletter
- Strategy for returning customers to the cart if they haven’t bought the product
- Aggregate scheme of marketing automation
Conclusion
We hope this content helps you map the actions you need to take to reach your goal in a given period of time.
Remember that every marketing plan should be periodically revised and adjusted, because the situation on the market, but also within companies, is changing.
Each document of this type is very specific, unique and depends on the industry the business is in, which makes it impossible to create template digital marketing strategies that will suit every business.
If you want help in creating an effective strategy and implementing it in order to develop your business, contact us, we will be happy to cooperate.
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