Although they’ve probably heard it a dozen times, many Australians aren’t quite sure what a marketing strategy actually is. In short, a marketing strategy presents a company’s general game plan for attracting customers by letting them know all the benefits of their products or services.
This definition sounds complicated but essentially, developing the perfect marketing strategy is easy if you do it one step at a time. Depending on the exact industry, there are at least 6 steps of building the perfect marketing strategy that would suit any prosperous Australian business.
Step 1: Running a SWOT analysis
The very beginning of developing a successful marketing strategy should consist of a SWOT analysis. Invented back in the 60s, SWOT analysis, as its acronym suggests, helps business people determine the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats to the company and its marketing opportunities.
SWOT can be graphical in nature but it mainly consists of brainstorming with the help of everyone involved in the project. From the last blue-collar worker to the top management executives, everyone is welcome to contribute with a proposal at this stage of the development of a marketing strategy.
Step 2: Determining the objective of the marketing strategy
In short, the objectives of your marketing strategy are nothing more than measurable outcomes. Whether you complete the main or minor objectives, it will tell you was your marketing strategy a success or a bust. In this sense, objectives serve the purpose of communicating the marketing strategy to the firm’s management and it helps them determine its success rate.
Every marketing strategy has between 3 to 5 key objectives that all need to be met in order for the strategy to be deemed successful. These objectives must be as specific and narrow as possible, easily measurable, and they ought to be defined within a time frame. Once determined, your objectives should be re-evaluated every half a year because market conditions often change over short periods.
Step 3: Figuring out a value proposition
Once you set your objective, you must know your firm’s value proposition before you’re ready to promote your brand. It should “encapsulate” the company’s main strengths which you have already identified through SWOT analysis.
The value proposition is essentially what you can offer clients but your competitors can’t. In this sense, the value proposition is going to be the single most important conversion factor in the entire marketing strategy. That’s why you should invest a lot of time and effort in developing it from scratch. Unless it contains a clear, exact, and problem-solving value proposition your marketing strategy cannot possibly succeed.
Step 4: Who are your buyer personas?
Just like men and women dream about their perfect partners so do marketers fantasize about their ideal customers. However, for the Aussie employed in a marketing agency, this is no love game, as their marketing strategy must identify the ideal customer. This persona is heavily-generalized and above all, fictional in nature but it helps the marketer come with an overall strategy.
A marketer must go through a ton of info to define the ideal buyer persona. After perusing through website analytics, customer reviews and social media platforms, the final task is to localize the buyer persona. You can do this by hiring an SEO reseller from Melbourne for instance, in order to save time because you still have to learn more about your customers.
Step 5: Understand who your customers are
Having defined the ideal, yet fictional customer, it’s time to turn to less than perfect, yet real customers. Understanding your customers will help you center the whole strategy on their needs, which is the key to selling more goods and services. After all, the whole point of creating a marketing strategy is selling more to customers.
Traditional marketing methods such as offline and online surveys, as well as focus groups, promise to yield the most info on your customers. In recent years, there have been smart online platforms that allow you to disseminate their online behavior, gender structure, demographics, etc. of your customers.
Step 6: Analyzing both the market and the competitors
The essence of a marketing strategy is to help you reach and exert influence on customers in a highly competitive market. When executed perfectly, your marketing strategy will make your company stand out from the bunch and hopefully reach brand stardom.
Step 6 of creating the perfect marketing strategy instructs you to research the market and find out what your competitors are up to. This doesn’t mean that you should engage in industrial espionage but merely stay up to the latest trends on the market.
For example, if all the competitors are preparing to launch a new product or significantly improve their service, your marketing strategy should stipulate a similar step. The more you know about the market and your competitions, the better will you be able to plan ahead in terms of marketing.
We hope that you now have a better understanding of how marketing strategies are devised. Every Australian business has to have a marketing strategy but not all of them are successful because they don’t follow the 6 essential steps listed above. Failing to research the market or skipping the value proposition can end in disaster when customers tart giving your brand a wide berth.
