Why Your Business Needs a Marketing Strategy

Why Your Business Needs a Marketing Strategy
By Published On: May 11, 2015

Plan Your Marketing and Reach More Customers

Many small business owners have an idea what their customers want. They know their competitors and what separates them from those competitors, but most small businesses owners don’t have a ton of time to plan their marketing.

There are many tools available for businesses to target customers based on their interests, buying habits, and online activities. However, like trying to use hammers and saws to build a house without a blueprint, these tools do not work well without a strategy. A strategy offers a guide as to what tools to use and how to use them to reach both existing and prospective customers.

Let’s look first at how you build your strategy. Then we’ll look at how it can help get you to you specific steps to take to help feel less lost in the online marketing world.

What’s in a marketing strategy?

Some of these questions may be easy for you to answer. Others may require a little research. It’s important in developing your future marketing outlets and campaigns, to answer the following questions with as much precision as you can. Here’s a sample of the types of questions to help create your strategy:

  • Who is your target audience(s)? (What are their interests, what do they read, where do they get their information, where do they spend their time online and in the real world?)
  • What are your goals? (e.g. clicks to your website, online purchases, foot traffic, brand recognition)
  • What is your most profitable product or service?
  • How do you want your business to be perceived?
  • What makes your business meaningfully unique? (Why do your customers choose your jewelry store instead of the one down the street?)
  • What are your competitors offering, and where?

Finding answers to these questions can be the difference between a successful marketing campaign and wasting money. If you are not confident in your answers to these questions or don’t have facts to back your assumptions, you may be wasting valuable time. Once you have successfully answered these questions, you can build a marketing strategy based on facts, which will be successful.

Why are these things so important?

You’ll feel better once you have these ideas down on paper. With answers to these questions, you’ll feel empowered in making your marketing and advertising decisions. As you put your strategy into play, the following will begin to emerge:

  • Where you should be marketing
  • New content ideas (e.g. blogs, quizzes, video) that help solve customer pain points
  • How to adjust messaging and online customer support/engagement tactics
  • New pages for your website that highlight your most profitable services and products and/or encourage visitors to join your email list
  • How to use social media advertising to hone in on new customers based on your existing website visitors, customer interests and personal characteristics
  • New advertising collateral that aligns with your key demographics and highlights your offers
  • Information from your website and social analytics to better define your online audience’s demographics, how they’re getting to your site, and what they’re doing once there
  • Which online channels or offers are more profitable

The key steps in developing your marketing strategy not only help you better define your business, they become the building blocks that guide your marketing campaigns and give you the tools necessary to measure your results and make corrections. As you better define your inputs and better develop your online tracking tools and techniques, you’re better able to target your campaigns to the right people. This is why it’s so important to have a marketing strategy.

That’s where Dream Local Digital comes in. We can help you develop and implement a marketing strategy, and we have written a white paper as a more in-depth guide for developing a plan for success. If you would like to receive our white paper, “A Honey Badger Guide to Creating a Marketing Plan,” click below.






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