No business is complete unless its marketing department is well-equipped and managed. A marketing plan is linked with the organizational strategy and takes up a large part of its budget. The essentiality of delivering value to the targeted audience to maximize profit is the core reasoning of a perfect marketing strategy. People who think that marketing is only focused on promotional activities are mistaken. Price, place, product, and promotion all are the key aspects and types of marketing strategy.
A marketing strategy needs to be perfect because it defines the business’s future in terms of growth, revenue, expansion, and other goals. Also, the marketing team spends a lot of time and research to devise a strategic marketing plan, so it should be promising and rewarding. As established, companies invest a lot of their capital in formulating and carrying out the plan. Hence it needs to be flawless. Here are a few steps that you need to take to build the perfect marketing strategy:
- SWOT Analysis
Before plunging into the market, self-analysis is crucial. And SWOT analysis gives you the perfect evaluation that you need to measure your firm’s competency and industry. SWOT is an abbreviation for two internal factors: strength, weakness, and external factors: opportunities and threats. Identify each four of the elements for your business will help you understand your winning game along with the loopholes in your plan.
Strengths like efficient employees, effective cost management, or proficient market research will help you devise a market strategy that encompasses all these benefiting factors. Weaknesses like weak IT structure or data management would help you build a marketing strategy that doesn’t revolve around these factors. Opportunities like the growth of marketing strategies like off page SEO or, in simple words, link-building will give higher rankings. And it also helps you make informed marketing decisions regarding the digital world. And lastly, threats like increasing competition or strict government legislation will help you stay ahead in the market by being proactive. Hence, market research and SWOT analysis is the primary step towards a strong marketing plan.
- Target Audience
Market leaders put a massive emphasis on filtering down your market base into a targeted audience. The first step for this would also be to conduct detailed market research regarding your potential customers. The second is to create a buyer’s persona based on the four market segmentation; geographic, psychographic, demographic, and behavioral. These four segmentations would be of immense help in reaching the exact audience interested in your product or service. It would help you make a marketing plan which is entirely focused on this specific group of people so that your efforts are engaged in the right direction.
- Competitor’s Analysis
The business industry has started to face cut-throat competition, especially since globalization became so common. Before entering or developing into a market, make sure that you know your existing customers’ strategies and project those of the potential ones. Competitor analysis is one way to understand your rivals’ weaknesses and strengths, so you can stay proactive and set benchmarks. The first step is to identify your competitors. They could be businesses similar to yours that sell a homogenous product. Still, they can’t be someone with an entirely different target audience.
Similarly, understand that your market rivalry is with the same-sized business. Secondly, research your competitors and learn their strategies regarding price, place, and promotion. Their policies might help you strategize yours, and their success can be your short-term benchmark. The final step is to compare your business with theirs through analysis like SWOT or PEST to get an idea of where you stand.
- Marketing Budget
The next and one of the most critical steps is to create a flexible marketing budget, which sits right with the company’s overall financing abilities. The market budget calculation is a lengthy and comprehensive task. It must cover every little detail about the costs and expenses that the marketing plan requires. As a marketer, your job is to fix a specific amount of capital money for your marketing budget. You must prove that your marketing plan will provide maximum contribution to the organization in reaching its goals and objective and that the money will not go to waste. There are several different ways to build a substantial marketing budget; one way is to be goal-driven. You’ll divide the budget into smaller and periodic goals. Another way is to set competitor’s benchmarks and set your budget just like theirs, as you can already see them succeeding with it. Or you could use a percentage of the revenue to allot budget to marketing.
- Marketing Objectives
Like any other plan, your marketing plan also needs to have goals you can later use to determine the assessment results. Objectives clarify and remove any ambiguity regarding the routes to follow and activities to complete. Your marketing team needs to be aware of these policies to practice the correct tactics and approaches to reach the marketing goal. The perfect marketing strategy is the one that has SMART goals – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. These five properties in an objective make it practical and readily operative with almost no loopholes. These goals need to align with the organizational goals, such as growth in expansion, revenue, or CSR. Marketing objectives could be to increase investment return through increased website traffic, lead generation, improved customer engagement, or more social media audience. The marketing strategies are, then, based on these objectives.
- Marketing Methods
Now that you have all your research and plan settled out, it is time to devise your marketing methods to pursue your marketing objective. The utmost essential marketing tool to settle within the target audience is the marketing mix: 4Ps. Price, product, place, and promotion. But even before that, you need to conduct an Ansoff Matrix research to gather where you stand in the marketing grid. After that, set the correct prices to attract customers and fix them according to your industry’s competition. Next, use your production capabilities wisely to minimize cost and wastages while maximizing customer value. Then, ensure the right channel to place your product to sit right with customers’ convenience. And lastly, formulate your promotion strategies with the new world’s methods, incorporating ways to reach out to your targeted audience in the fastest way possible.
Conclusion
It’s time to take action! Now that you’re done with your perfect marketing strategy and have communicated it to your team, you could start implementing it. Make sure to keep thorough supervision on the activities so that you can take corrective measures as soon as possible. Remember that your marketing strategy is a way to reach the organizational goal, so always keep it aligned with administrative activities.
