Marketing Strategy
The Starting Point For Success.A company’s marketing strategy should always be linked back to its business strategy. When creating your business strategy, your executive team identified how they expect to utilize every type of resource at their disposal (to its best possible advantage), in an attempt to grow a healthy business.
Marketing’s job is to take that business strategy and use it to attract the types of customers defined as “ideal” by your executive team. Also, your marketing strategy should identify core messages that exploit your business strategy and leave simple one or two-word thoughts in a prospective customer’s mind of what your company stands for; this is referred to as positioning.
Remember ...
“Positioning is NOT what you do to a product or service.
Positioning is what you do to the mind of the potential customer.”
Standing for something that makes sense to the prospective customer differentiates you from all your competitors, helps you to stand out, and helps the potential customer lean more towards your direction at decision time.
A Big Mistake
A typical challenge associated with a small business marketing is that there is little time/effort spent developing a strategy. After reading a few blog articles and hearing about a YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram success, lots of small businesses tend to develop a “build it, and they will come mentality.” And while a small percentage of companies do get lucky like this, the clear majority do not. This type of thinking is one of the key reasons why most new small businesses don’t succeed.
Many small business owners are too focused on “getting it done” instead of focusing on “do it right the first time.”
Creating a strategy requires that you look at who your competitors are, think through why you believe you can beat them and how you feel you’re going to do it. Often this exercise will force you to adjust your product/service to fit your newly created strategy better. In many cases creating a marketing strategy will force you to rethink your pricing, your service levels, your warranty, or other key features to help you better compete.
An added benefit of creating a marketing strategy is that this completed work provides the
perfect template for sales training, which is so often overlooked in many small businesses.
We routinely find that most business owners have bits and pieces of a marketing strategy already in their minds. After all, these bits and pieces are likely the catalyst that initially inspired the creation of the new business idea. In these cases, we work with them to formalize this information, complete areas that lack detail, and perform any required competitive intelligence to improve their positioning.
We've created unique marketing strategies for hundreds of companies; our fundamental process is always the same.
- We determine which parts of a business strategy already exist; we test the viability of each piece.
- We look for missing or incomplete sections, and we fill in as required.
- We determine/evaluate the target customer base for your product or service.
- We test your competitive advantage against each of your top competitors.
- We test the overall strength of your business against your competitors.
- We leverage every resource available that helps us to create a tremendous competitive advantage while ensuring minimal impact on your team and budget.
Curious about how we can help you with your Marketing Strategy, why not give us a call to discuss your situation, and how we might be able to help?
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