To begin an effective strategic marketing strategy, it is imperative to know your customer, as well as your competition. Knowing what your target audience is, and knowing who your target customer is, will be the first step towards developing a marketing strategy. Once you have identified your audience, you can then begin to tailor your marketing strategy, including your collaborative marketing efforts.
Who is your customer?
You can start by making a series of imaginary profiles of your potential clients and customers, asking specific questions such as:
- What is the age range of my potential clients?
- What is their income range/
- What are their lifestyles and hobbies?
Depending on the product you are marketing, your phantom client profile will vary. The motivation here is to think of the customer as an individual, rather than as an amorphous group of unknown clients. Once you identify a potential client profile, it will be a more natural process to tailor a marketing scheme.
An effective marketing plan begins with thinking specifically in terms of whom your market is, and who you are trying to entice to use your products and services. An advertisement, email or website display will vary greatly depending on whether you are targeting college age, financially conservative students, middle income families with small children, or single, young professional adults. The same series of advertisements is likely to appeal to a diverse variety of clients than a variety of ads tailored specifically to reach an audience. The same product may very well be suitable for a variety of clients, but the same product is less likely to sell to a varied consumer base with the same marketing strategy.
Don't reinvent the wheel
Knowledge of your competitors' marketing scheme and how they market their products is almost as important as being able to identify your prospective clients. There is a lot to be learned from studying a competitor, especially if they are a well established business with a solid marketing strategy.
Marketing is the way to get your products noticed—this is why it is an essential aspect to a successful business. If nobody knows about you, how can they purchase your wonderful goods and services?
Build upon what has proven successful
If you know of a business in your industry that has catchy marketing ads, it is a good idea to try to understand what they have done to be successful. This is important for two reasons: you don't want to exactly replicate another marketing strategy, and you want your advertisements to stand apart from what is already being produced. This will help you to develop and tailor your marketing scheme to your target audience, in a way that is different from your competition—and get you noticed!
Awareness of how similar businesses in your industry approach marketing will help you develop the edge you need to target your own clients. Intimate knowledge of who these prospective clients are will set you in the right direction for developing a successful marketing strategy that is unique and specific to your business. Knowing your target market, and how the market is targeted by others in your industry, will put your business on a successful path for growth and recognition. Based upon this knowledge, you can even choose a synergistic competitor and create a collaboration marketing campaign.
Copyright (c) 2008 Christian Fea
Most businesses have both a strategic marketing plan and a tactical marketing plan, and it is important to keep these two platforms separate. People often mistakenly assume that when you talk about marketing, you're speaking of "tactical" marketing, which consists of placing ads, generating leads, sending out mailers and brochures, etc. However, strategic marketing focuses on the message and communication of the message. Simply put, tactical marketing is the execution of your marketing plan - the medium by which your message is delivered, and strategic marketing focuses on the content of your message—what you say and to whom you say it.
The key difference is the focus on making sure overall customer situations mesh with your overall company direction. Not to get distracted, or veer off course of your overall company direction, but at every step of development for your strategic plan, and execution of your plan, that you are indeed on course of what the overall vision and goals of the company are.
Content vs. Execution
Many companies try to figure out how to sell more before they find out how to provide a solution to their consumers' needs. The procedure for accomplishing this is exactly the same every single time, for every kind of business. It is the advertiser's job to pay attention to human nature, to research human nature, and to have some insight into how people make their purchasing decisions. Strategically, marketing programs and advertising should get the attention of target market prospects and facilitate their decision-making. This lowers their risk for taking the next step in the buying process. By understanding what's important to your target market, you can then put together a strategy that gets more qualified prospects to call, reduces your sales cycle, and increases your conversion ratios. After the strategy is in place, the tactical execution simply consists of testing and implementing your strategic plan. Business-to-business Strategic Marketing
There is a business-to-business aspect to many companies, in which case these business-to-business transactions count as customer situation. For marketing to businesses who are your clients and customers, this means combining industry sector segmentation and product use with other factors related to purchasing decisions. For example, this would include purchase criteria and decision motivations that effect larger, enterprise sized purchases. In this case, part of your strategic marketing plan is to build strong, personal relationships with these larger businesses, and focus on providing customized service, products and even anticipate the needs of your business clients. Although a business is obviously a larger entity than a single customer, many of the same principles prevail; the most important being a keen sense of service, and making them feel they are important and that you pay special attention to them.
A strategic marketing plan encompasses developing a message, and developing the best way to communicate this message—and contemplates the best strategy to deal with communicating this message. Tactical marketing is important as it executes the strategic plan, but it is important to keep these two subjects divided as you develop a successful marketing plan for your company.
Copyright (c) 2008 Christian Fea
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Christian Fea has sinced written about articles on various topics from Partnerships, Joint Venture and Business Plan. Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A strategic Collaboration Marketing consulting firm. He empowers business owners to discover and implement Integration, Alliance, and Joint Venture marketing tactics to solve specific business challenges. He demons. Christian Fea's top article generates over 22200 views. to your Favourites.