How to Create a Small Business Marketing Strategy

What you need to know when implementing a successful marketing strategy.

7 Steps to Building the Perfect Marketing Strategy

We explore the key steps to follow when creating a competitive, well-informed marketing strategy for your business to help build a strong marketing plan

Building a strong marketing strategy lies at the foundation of any prospering, competitive business.

As terms can sometimes get mixed up, let’s firstly clarify what a marketing strategy is. It refers to an organization’s overall game plan for attracting customers by communicating the benefits of their business and key differentiators.

It’s the big picture of the company’s vision informing the marketing plan, which address the vital question: what tactics are you going to use to meet your goals and bring your strategy to life?

To help you build an excellent action plan, you firstly need to ensure you’ve ticked all boxes when devising the marketing strategy, so we’ve put together a list of seven handy action points to pay attention to when conducting your research.

Run a SWOT analysis 

Start by running a SWOT analysis to identify your business’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

It’s actually a fun team exercise, vital to your planning process as it shall inform in one way or another all the following key steps outlined below. To avoid bias and cover different perspectives, get as many fellow colleagues to contribute as possible.

Having a clear view on what you’re best at, what areas you need to improve on, spotting the external factors that represent the motivation for your business to exist or, on the other hand, factors that have the potential to place your business at risk, will equip you with the right tools to build a well-informed marketing strategy.

Figure out the value proposition

A great marketing strategy derives from a company’s value proposition, which encapsulates its main strengths (identified in the SWOT analysis) and differentiators against competitors, as opposed to being created from scratch.

Determining your value proposition is probably the step you should invest most time and resources into, as it is one of the most important conversion factors and what could make the difference between closing a sale and losing it.

Get started by identifying the main customer benefits and what value your products/services bring to the customer, followed by outlining the key differentiators.

The best value propositions are clear, to the point, and they focus on solving customers’ problems.

Determine marketing strategy objectives

Organizations define and communicate their goals using objectives.

Objectives specify measurable outcomes that will be achieved within a particular time frame and they help individuals evaluate the success and effectiveness of a particular marketing strategy.

They aid marketers to align expectations and plans, coordinate efforts, and hold teams accountable for achieving results.

When putting together your key objectives (aim for 3-5), ensure they meet the following criteria: they’re specific, measurable, and have a time frame.

Re-evaluate them every six months, make changes if necessary, and use them to measure success.

Understand your customers

In order to embed your customers’ needs and seek to solve their problems through your marketing strategy, you firstly need to fully understand them.

In the marketing space, there’s been lots of buzz on customer centricity, a strategy to fundamentally align a company’s products and services with the wants and needs of its most valuable customers.

In their quest of getting to know them, marketers have started to rely less on traditional market research methods such as surveys or focus groups and pay more attention to smart online platforms and tools that tell them everything about their customers’ demographics, online behaviors, and conversations.

Define your buyer personas

Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. They help marketers better understand and get closer to customers, as real humans.

The process of creating buyer personas involves gathering insight from different platforms such as website analytics, social media channels, customer reviews as well as actual conversations with prospects and customers.

When researching and building personas, look into their background, preferences, demographics details, and based on that, determine what’s the most appropriate way to communicate with them, what channels they prefer, style and tone of voice, etc.

Analyze your market and competitors

We’ve established that a clever marketing strategy is a business’ game plan which helps them flourish and stand out from competition.

But to get to that level, you need to have expert knowledge into what’s happening in your market and how are you competitors doing: what are their struggles? What’s working for them? Which are their weak links?

Once again, information is power. Use intelligent platforms, like Brandwatch, to answer all questions above and learn about your competition.

Keeping your ears and eyes open for what’s happening in your industry is vital in helping you identify gaps in the market, needs that aren’t being fulfilled, common frustrations, or trends and innovative ideas.

Establish your marketing methods

Depending on your target audience, you will need to pick the best marketing methods to explain, teach, and communicate your brand messaging.

Find out where your audience lives (which social channels they prefer, blogs, sites, forums, etc.) and use that information to your advantage to reach them.

It’s equally important to determine at an early stage which marketing areas you’ll focus on attention on and how much time and budget you’ll be spending on advertising, PR, content marketing, SEO, community management, events, etc. depending on the nature of your business and what would appeal most to your future customers.

Develop a marketing strategy

Effective marketing starts with a considered, well-informed marketing strategy. A good marketing strategy helps you define clear, realistic and measurable marketing objectives for your business.

Your marketing strategy affects the way you run your business, so it should be planned and developed in consultation with your team. It is a wide-reaching and comprehensive strategic planning tool that:

• describes your business and its products and services
• explains the position and role of your products and services in the market
• profiles your customers and your competition
• identifies the marketing tactics you will use
• allows you to build a marketing plan (the tactics to deliver) and measure its effectiveness.

A marketing strategy sets the overall direction and goals for your marketing, and is therefore different from a marketing plan, which outlines the specific actions you will take to implement your marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy could be developed for the next few years, while your marketing plan usually describes tactics to be achieved in the current year.

Write a successful marketing strategy

Your well-developed marketing strategy will help you realize your business’s goals and focus on the actions required to reach the right customers.

Developing a marketing strategy that includes the components listed below will help you make the most of your marketing investment, keep your marketing focused, and measure and improve your sales results.

Identify your business goals

Align your marketing strategy to the business goals outlined in your business plan; you can then define a set of marketing goals to support them. Your business goals might include:

• increasing awareness of your products and services
• selling more products from a certain supplier
• reaching a new customer segment.

When setting goals it’s critical to be as targeted as possible so you can effectively measure the outcomes against what you set out to achieve. A simple criteria for goal-setting is the SMART method:

• Specific – state clearly what you want to achieve
• Measurable – set tangible measures so you can measure your results
• Achievable – set objectives that are within your capacity and budget
• Relevant – set objectives that will help you improve particular aspects of your business
• Time-bound – set objectives you can achieve within the time you need them.

State your marketing goals

Define a set of specific marketing goals based on the business goals. These goals will motivate you and your team and enable you to track your success.

Examples of marketing goals include increased market penetration (selling more existing products to existing customers) or market development (selling existing products to new target markets). These marketing goals could be long-term and might take a few years to successfully achieve. However, they should be clear and measurable and have time frames for achievement.

Make sure your overall strategies are also practical and measurable. A good marketing strategy will not be changed every year, but revised when your strategies have been achieved or your marketing goals have been met. You may need to amend your strategy if your external market changes due to a new competitor or new technology, or if your products substantially change.

Research your market

Research is an essential part of your marketing strategy. You need to gather information about your market, such as its size, growth, social trends and demographics (population statistics such as age, gender and family type). It is important to keep an eye on your market so you are aware of any changes over time, so your strategy remains relevant and targeted.

Profile your potential customers

Use your market research to develop a profile of the customers you are targeting and identify their needs.

The profile will reveal their buying patterns, including how they buy, where they buy and what they buy. Again, regularly review trends so you don’t miss out on new opportunities or become irrelevant with your marketing message.

While you try to find new customers, make sure your marketing strategy also allows you to maintain relationships with your existing customers.

Profile your competitors

Similarly, as part of your marketing strategy you should develop a profile of your competitors by identifying their products, supply chains, pricing and marketing tactics.

Use this to identify your competitive advantage – what sets your business apart from your competitors. You may also want to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your own internal processes to help improve your performance compared with your competition.

Develop strategies to support your marketing goals

List your target markets and devise a set of strategies to attract and retain them. An example goal could be to increase young people’s awareness of your products. Your corresponding strategies could be to increase your online social media presence by posting regular updates about your product on Instagram or Facebook; advertising in local magazines targeted to young people; or offering discounts for students.

Use the ‘7 Ps of marketing’

Reach your selected market by utilizing the 7 Ps of marketing mix. If you can choose the right combination of marketing across product, price, promotion, place, people, process and physical evidence, your marketing strategy is more likely to be a success. You can choose any combination of these to achieve your marketing strategy.

Test your ideas

In deciding your tactics, do some online research, test some ideas and approaches on your customers and your staff, and review what works. You will need to choose a number of tactics in order to meet your customers’ needs, reach the customers within your target market and improve your sales results.