Marketing Strategy 101 – What You Need To Know
You may have an awesome product or service; but without knowing how to it get in front of the right potential audience – you’re not going to have much success.
An effective way in crafting how to do this, is putting together something called a marketing strategy.
In this guide, you’ll learn what a marketing strategy is, as well as what you need to focus on to make it successful.
Marketing Strategy 101 – What You Need To Know
What Is A Marketing Strategy
A marketing strategy is the step by step planned approach, to finding out how to get your products and services in front of the right audience.
Below, we’ll detail the four steps you need to take to do this effectively.
Marketing Strategy Tip 1 – Know Your Audience
The very first step when putting together your marketing strategy, is understanding who would benefit from your product or service. As per our article here titled Sales Targeting Strategy, you first need to work out who in fact would benefit from your product or service.
Generally, people are quite broad here and think that everyone could benefit from it.
However as the famous saying goes, “If you try to serve everybody – you’ll end up serving nobody”.
Niche down what audience would benefit the most from what you’re selling, and write this list out.
For example, we sell an online sales training program. Our audience would be:
- Real Estate Agents
- Brokers
- Financial Advisers
- Insurance Sales Professionals
- Consultants and Business Development Managers
- Business Owners who sell face to face or on the phone
By writing out this list, it gives me clarity on exactly who I need to market our program to, because they would mostly benefit from it.
Although everyone needs to learn how to sell and influence, this audience above would benefit the most.
So figure out who would benefit the most from your products and services.
Strategy Tip 2 – What’s Your Competition Doing?
The second part of your marketing plan is to research what your competitors are doing.
You don’t want to create your business around what they’re doing, otherwise you’ll always be a step behind. Instead, seek to be innovative and always try to do better in every instance.
Something I personally use that works very well, are two tools called Ubersuggest, and another called SimilarWeb.
Ubersuggest allows me to put in my competitors web address (URL) and see how much traffic they’re getting, what web pages are ranking the highest, and what keywords they’re focusing on to bring in inbound leads.
Similarweb is similar, and let’s me track what is referring traffic you their sites, as well as their web traffic and social media presence.
With this information, I can see what they’re selling, and how they’re selling it.
Don’t copy, but instead do what’s working.
Just ensure that whatever you do, do it better.
Marketing Strategy Tip 3 – Lead Generation
Once you know who your ideal audience is and who your competitors are, you can now focus on attracting your ideal audience.
To do this, you’ll have to have two kinds of prospecting strategies.
These are inbound sales strategies, and outbound sales strategies.
Inbound sales strategies are marketing activities you to do bring leads into your business without reaching out.
Outbound sales strategies are marketing activities to reach out to your audience proactively.
You can learn more about both of these strategies by reading the related article below.
Related article: Two Types of Sales Prospecting Methods For More Sales
Marketing Strategy Tip 4 – Sales Process
One of the more important parts of the marketing strategy plan, is to have a step by step consistent system that turns interested prospects into happy buyers.
Notice I use the word consistent.
Your sales can’t be doing OK one day, and not the other. A good sales process is one where you’re in control of the process, and where your prospect feels comfortable, relaxed and open to have dialogue.
This consultative selling approach is the last required step of your marketing strategy.
Final thoughts
This marketing strategy plan is a quick guide to help you as a small business owner, or sales professional start to attracting the right audience, and win more sales.
If you want to learn more about implementing the sales process in your business, you can register for your 7 day sales challenge here.
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