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Any marketing strategy boils down to four steps: identifying your target market, analyzing your market’s interests and behaviors, selecting an effective marketing channel, and employing feedback mechanisms to measure your success.
1. Identifying your target market:
In this step, you need to review your previous and past customers to find a pattern. Look for qualities all of these customers have in common. Examples of relevant qualities to look for include but are not limited to, age, gender, occupation, industry, and education level. These qualities vary depending on the company. Analyzing these qualities will help you segment the market and find the segment you will be targeting.
2. Interests and behavior of your target market:
After you have identified your target market, you will then analyze their interests and behaviors. Research the values that this group of people generally hold. This will guide you when developing marketing materials. Ensuring that your marketing materials coincide with your market’s values will make your company more attractive to them. You also need to analyze their behaviors. Important behaviors to focus on are their media consumption habits. Research if this segment is active online, or prefers more traditional media outlets, such as newspapers. In the case of business to business marketing, consider identifying networking events or trade journals your potential clients are interested in. Evaluating the interests and behavior of your target market can help you select the most effective marketing channels.
3. Selecting an effective marketing channel:
After evaluating your target market’s interests and behaviors, research potential marketing channels and select which one aligns most with your target market. If they are active online, try a social media campaign or a Google Ads campaign. When marketing to other businesses, the social media platform that is most effective is LinkedIn. Most businesses are active on this site, and you will be more likely to have more meaningful engagements on this site over other social media platforms. If your target market is more analog, sending personalized postcards and mailers may be more effective.
4. Feedback:
Lastly, make sure you are employing feedback mechanisms to analyze your marketing campaign. Depending on your campaign, this could be the number of views on your website, phone calls resulting from a postcard, or people following up from an event. After receiving the feedback, evaluate the results. Determine whether or not the campaign was successful. Most importantly, use this information to improve upon future marketing campaigns.
Following these four basic steps will help you outline an effective marketing strategy, and ultimately more success.
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