Here’s How To Plan The Perfect Marketing Strategy

Are you thinking about starting a business? If so, then marketing needs to be a key part of the plan. Without the right marketing strategy in place, your business is going to be dead in the water. The good news is that it’s easier than most new business owners realize to market a company. Here’s a step by step guide that will put you on the right path. 

Think About Your Industry 

First, you need to consider your industry. This is going to have an impact on what marketing choices are more or less likely to work for your business in the future. For instance, you might be exploring opening a restaurant. It’s fair to say that restaurant marketing is totally different to alternatives such as marketing a website. This means that you need to approach it from a totally different perspective to gain the right impact. For instance, you might want to think about.

Explore Your Buyer Persona

Next, you should think about exploring buyer personas. Buyer personas are essentially the ideal customer who is likely to be interested in the products and services that you are selling. The easiest way to create a buyer persona is by sending out surveys. With surveys, you can get immediate answers and also find out what type of marketing is most likely to resonate with them and lead to a sale in the future. As such, this is a step that you should actually take early on in the development of your business plan and your marketing strategy. 

Use The Right Tools 

Another point worth thinking about is making sure that you are using the right tools to create the right marketing strategy. For instance, you might want to consider using software solutions like Hubspot. With Hubspot, you can set up campaigns and then keep track, using a wide variety of different platforms to get the most out of a comprehensive marketing strategy. There are of course other tools that could benefit you and your marketing strategy. As such, it’s a matter of finding the right option for your business and your budget. Don’t worry, there are scalable options suitable for small and large companies alike. That brings us neatly to our next point. 

Think About Your Budget

You do need to make sure that you are thinking about your marketing budget when you are planning your strategy. Overall, you are likely to spend about 20% of your total budget on marketing. As such, you need to make sure that you are thinking about how to make the most out of the money that you are spending. There are lots of ways to create a scaled back campaign that generates the right impact and this could be useful if you are working with a tighter budget compared to some of your main competitors. 

Choose Your Social Media

Next, you should make sure that you are thinking about your social media strategy. Social media is going to be a key part of your strategy. It’s the best way to interact and engage with your customer base and make sure that your business is appealing to the right customers. The first step here will be finding out which social media networks your customers are using. Again, you can do this by setting up a survey and finding out which ones they are most likely to use by asking directly. Alternatively, you can explore a market research tool. 

Get To Know SEO

SEO is the bread and butter for any business marketing strategy. Without SEO, you are going to struggle to stand out online. The good news is that there are lots of ways that you can boost your SEO campaign. For instance, you might want to think about using a tool like SEMRush. This is a great, user-friendly way to boost your SEO if you have already set up your website. If you haven’t set up your website, then it’s best to use a business website developer and cook in the SEO from the ground up. 

Don’t Forget PPC

On the other side of SEO, you could also think about PPC marketing. PPC marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to promote your business because it’s easy to keep track of how much you are spending on each campaign. This means that you can also start and stop your campaigns or adjust the budget in real time and make sure that things are working correctly. This also means that you don’t have to worry about spending money without being able to track whether it’s making a measurable difference to your business. This is a big difference compared to an SEO strategy. 

Use Old School Tactics

It’s easy to get carried away with new marketing strategies when promoting your business. However, you should absolutely think about using older marketing tactics as well. One example of this would be email marketing. Email marketing is key because it’s a way to easily reach a wide group of customers with minimum effort. You might have heard that email marketing no longer works anymore. This isn’t the case but you do need to think more carefully about the content you are creating and how you are reaching your audience. Essentially, it’s all about making things more personalized and special for your audience. 

Track Everything 

Another key point we want to mention is that you should be tracking everything. By tracking your marketing campaign, you’ll always know what is working and what isn’t. The vast majority of marketing tools will provide you with an option to do this that is built in so you don’t have to worry about it taking more time and effort. You might also be able to set up automated changes based on how your campaign is tracking. This is definitely something to think about if you are using tools like Google Ads as SEMrush. These are just a couple of the possibilities but you should really be tracking everything.
Hire The Pros 

Ideally, you should absolutely make sure that you are hiring professionals to complete at least some of the marketing work for you. If you don’t do this, then there’s a possibility that you are going to fall behind key competitors who are spending more than you to stand out on the SERPs. When you decide to hire a marketing agency, you should always check the reviews as they are not all equal. As such, it is in your best interest to find the right company who can deliver the results that you need for your company. 

Think Outside The Box 

Finally, you should make sure that you are thinking outside the box when you are marketing your business. By thinking outside the box, you can ensure that your business has the greatest chance of standing out in the future. One example of this could include guerilla marketing such as viral campaigns online. Businesses often assume that it’s going to be difficult to go viral. However, this isn’t the case. Instead, there are lots of different steps that you can take to make sure that you go viral with your marketing strategy. One of the best options would be to create the right content. This could include anything from video content to infographics. 

We hope this helps you understand some of the key steps that you need to take to ensure that you are planning the right marketing strategy for your business. In doing so, you can create the best possible impact and get your brand the interest and demand that it rightfully deserves on the market.