With the New Year in sight, if you are like many people, you are trying to come up with the best resolution for not only yourself, but for your business. As marketing trends change, your business evolves, and current events unfold, one thing that you should always stay on top of is your marketing plan. At this point in the year, you have probably already started to develop, and maybe even finalized, your marketing approach for the upcoming year; however, if you haven’t yet, now is the time, because in less than two weeks, the New Year will be here. We are going to review some tips for setting up your marketing strategy for the New Year and beyond.
What is a Marketing Strategy?
Before you can set up your marketing strategy for the New Year, you need to fully understand what a marketing strategy is.
According to Investopedia, “A marketing strategy refers to a business’s overall game plan for reaching prospective consumers and turning them into customers of their products or services. A marketing strategy contains the company’s value proposition, key brand messaging, data on target customer demographics, and other high-level elements.”
Your marketing strategy should define who your ideal audience is, where they are, what type of messaging they are looking for, and what products and services they need. In your marketing strategy you should really think about the audience you are trying to reach and what you would like for them to do, by setting defined goals.
Your marketing strategy is similar to your company’s marketing plans, but should be focused more on long term goals. A marketing strategy connects with your business strategy and is the foundation for what the company needs to connect with its target audience and meet its objectives. A marketing plan includes the detailed steps you’ll take to achieve the established marketing goals or overarching strategy of the business or a specific campaign. Marketing plans focus more on individual campaigns, while a marketing strategy is focused more on the overall goals of your marketing efforts and how you will reach your ideal audience.
Setting up Your Marketing Strategy for the New Year
If your New Year’s resolution is to knock your company’s marketing out of the park in the upcoming year, it all starts with your marketing strategy. To create a marketing strategy, you need to identify your organization’s goals for the New Year, understand your consumers, create clear and unified messaging, define your budget, determine what marketing channels to use, and have a plan for how you will measure your success.
If you haven’t noticed yet, one of the most important components to setting up your marketing strategy is understanding your ideal audience. When you create your marketing strategy, it is the time to dig a little deeper and ask yourself what it is that your ideal customers need and how will they fulfill that need. What do they search for on search engines? Where are they searching for this information; what search engines and tools are they specifically using? Are they more frequently on a mobile device or on a computer? What social media platforms are they using the most (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)? By knowing where your ideal customer is and what they are looking for, you can reach them more effortlessly.
A successful marketing strategy will focus on the entire customer journey. As we have said before, your customers are on an adventure, known as the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey describes a series of choices consumers make while researching a purchase decision. The buyer’s journey has three main stages: awareness, consideration, and decision/purchase. You should consider all stages when creating an effective marketing strategy.
As referenced above, you need to be able to measure the success of your efforts, so be sure that you have a plan set in place to define how you will determine if you have achieved your goals or not.
When it comes to creating a marketing strategy, we get it. There so much going on during this time of the year that it may be the last thing on your mind; however, starting off the New Year right is one of the first steps to reaching your goals.
At Water Bear Marketing, our goal is to help your business get more business. We are here for you and can help you set up a marketing strategy for the New Year and beyond. With our technology, you are able to easily see your results and gain a better understanding of your ideal customers and how they work.
At Water Bear Marketing, meeting your marketing expectations is our number one objective. We provide our clients with 24/7 access to our reporting dashboard. This transparency allows our clients to have access to review their campaign performance anywhere and anytime. Our goal is to drive the best return on investment by tracking results.
Contact us for a free consultation today.