Coming Up With a Marketing Strategy

You’ve started your own business. You’ve got your website up and running and you’ve even got a few customers. But now it’s time to do the real serious marketing and get more traffic coming your way. So how do you do it? You need to come up with a marketing strategy so that you can take the big process of marketing and break it down, piece by piece, into a manageable and measurable endeavor. Here’s how to get started: Identify your customers. You really need to have a clear grasp of who it is that you’re going to be marketing to if you’re going to be able to come up with an effective marketing strategy. Take some time to sit down, think about who your customers and potential customers are and write down a profile of your average client.

Consider all of the methods of marketing to your customers. If your customers are people who are regularly online, you will want to focus on online marketing strategies. If your customers regularly attend certain conventions or other industry events, you will want to incorporate those into your marketing strategy. Figure out where your customers will be (physically or virtually) and then plan to be there. Anticipate your customers’ needs. Once you have identified who it is that you are marketing to, consider what it is that they need (or think that they need). Then figure out how you can give it to them. If you can anticipate your customer’s needs, your marketing strategy will tell them how to meet those needs before they even realized they wanted to know how. Identify your own abilities and lack thereof. In some ways, you won’t be able to met all of your customers needs. Perhaps you don’t have the manpower to do certain things or maybe you don’t have the start-up capital. It’s okay; every business has its areas that it can’t compete in. Knowing those areas, being honest with yourself about them and designing a marketing strategy which minimizes those areas while maximizing the areas in which you can compete is the best approach to your business. Know why your company is better than the competition and be able to articulate that. Set marketing goals. You need to know what you want, and you need to be able to measure those goals to see if you’re accomplishing them. Review them periodically to stay on track. Write it all down. You have to be committed to making your marketing strategy work and that means seeing it through on paper before you start to do it in real life. Check out this marketing strategy checklist to make sure that you’ve covered all of the basic elements in your marketing strategy. Creating a marketing strategy is challenging work. It forces you to pinpoint what your business does and who it does it for, identify your abilities and lack thereof and figuring out how best to market and communicate those abilities to potential customers. It isn’t easy. But it’s a necessary part of growing your business from the ground up. By getting it done on paper and then following through with each step in action, you can make your marketing strategy work.