The first step to formulating a marketing strategy is understanding your business goals. If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you get there? This blog post discusses 4 reasons why all of your marketing strategies should start with business goals. And then, outlines the process for making sure that happens. The goal of this post is to help entrepreneurs develop or refine their marketing strategy. This starts with their specific vision for the business.
A marketing strategy is something that every business needs in order to be successful. The first step to formulating a marketing strategy is understanding your business goals and figuring out what you want the company culture to look like.
To create an effective marketing campaign, it’s important to know where you’re going. Then, you will have a clear idea of what success will mean for your campaigns.
In this post, we’ll be going over marketing strategies that align with specific business goals. You can also use these marketing types to help you refine your marketing strategy. Starting with the goal of the company and then creating a marketing plan based on what’s already been established for how you want to grow as an organisation.
There isn’t a cookie cutter approach to developing marketing strategies. It will be different for every company and should take into consideration. Your marketing budget, the location of your business (local or global), the type of organisation you are running, what kind of customers you want to attract, and more. But as a general rule of thumb marketing strategies are generally built upon the 4 P’s of marketing. Pricing, Placement, Product and Promotions.
But let’s start at the beginning by setting business goals:
Step 1
Business goals should be the starting point for all marketing strategies so you have a clear North Star you are heading to.
Step 2
Communicate your business goals to everyone in the organisation so they are aligned and know what you’re trying to achieve. This is especially important for marketing and sales managers. It provides them with a clear framework of how to approach marketing, as well as expectations throughout the process. Here’s an example: “We want our company to be famous for the best in class marketing solution for retailers”. It’s imperative to communicate throughout all channels of communication – company website, social media profiles, marketing emails etc.
Step 3
Make sure sales and marketing teams are aligned and marketing is a priority, not an after-thought for the sales team. It helps when the sales pipeline and sales process is transparent to the marketing team. Doing so, they understand where they can improve their marketing tactics. Make sure all team members sign off on marketing metrics early on. By doing so, you can measure progress and make quick changes when needed. This will help provide insight into what marketing initiatives are working best for your business goals as well as ensure that marketing remains relevant. For example, if a lead nurture component gets low opening rate during the sales process this can be improved by looking at the lead scoring.
Step 4
Abandon a campaign if the business goal is not reached. Evaluate marketing campaigns regularly and if they are not successful, switch them off. There is no point in keeping things going when they don’t support your business goal. Whether that is getting more brand awareness or sales. Don’t forget that marketers are really good at marketing themselves and they love the next shiny thing. But if you have clear KPIs and metrics in place that define how marketing can support the business goals, then there is only black and white when it comes to performance. No marketer can argue with that.
If you want to make sure that your marketing strategies are effective, start by understanding the specific goals of your business. For example, if one goal is to increase sales in a particular product category then all of your tactics should be focused on achieving this objective. Once you have evaluated the success or failure of each strategy and made adjustments where needed, it’s time for another round! It can take several iterations over months or even years before an entrepreneur finds what works best for their company. But patience pays off. Just ask any successful small business owner who has been operating profitably for more than 10 years about how they did it!
Let us help you with your marketing strategy so that together we create a winning plan that will get great results.