7 Tips to Develop a Successful Marketing Strategy
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The thought to prosper in a business without a marketing strategy is just futile. Rude? No. I am just being honest. Moreover, business goals can only be achieved by formulating a successful marketing strategy. In this article, we will talk about the top 7 tips for a successful marketing strategy.
What is a Successful Marketing Strategy?
Marketing and sales can either be your best friends or your worst enemies. Let me tell you how! Marketing planning is essential for the ultimate growth of your business because it will discuss your biggest marketing challenges and once it is planned successfully, it even delivers a solution to those challenges. A successful marketing strategy requires a number of marketing tactics, which must be updated from time to time.
A successful marketing strategy is mainly responsible for bringing the best out of your organization. The primary goal of a successful marketing strategy is to grow your business, create brand awareness, expand your business reach, and obviously create a better bond between your business and your customers.
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Let’s get straight to the 7 tips to develop a successful marketing strategy.
The 7 tips for successful marketing strategy are-
1) Align yourself with your Vision-
Before strategizing, you need to understand why you do what you do and that is why it is very important for you to have a clear vision of your company goals. Having a clear business agenda is the very first tip for a successful marketing strategy. All that you need is to have a better connection with your customers. So, you need to know that setting up short-term goals and achieving them is only possible when you know what problems your company needs to solve and how you with your employees actually serve society. Your company’s clear vision will help you to develop a successful marketing strategy.
Before you formulate your business goals, remember-
- Your vision should be something you actually believe in.
- It should be aligned with your moral values.
- A clear and concise vision is essential so that you do not run into circles.
For strategizing the marketing practices you need to always be aligned with your vision to stay in telepathic communication with your target audience.
2) Collect your Customer Data-
The collection of customer data is the most important key to developing a successful marketing strategy. Why? Because without the collection of data, you are just marketing blindly with no goal. Customer needs personalization, so once you derive their personalized data you can simply create a marketing plan which is personalized. This will help you in attaining customers in the long run. Not just this, collecting customer data also provides you with the best quality insights into your customer behavior.
If you have been running a business for quite a while now and are struggling to experience your ‘eureka’ moment, fetching the entire customer data is very important, and more than that you need to arrange your database appropriately.
For collecting data, you need to know your customers appropriately.
Ways to know your customers-
- Interview them
- Circulate Survey forms
- Follow your major customers on social media
Why is creating a database important?
Database marketing also called customer relationship management, is a crucial part of a successful marketing strategy because it helps marketers in establishing a relevant connection between their business and potential customers. The analysis of the clients or the customers you already have will help you to create a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customers which can help you to understand your customers better. In simpler words, database marketing is all about understanding and managing your customers.
A database mainly consists of data elements like name, email, contact number, job title, company name, purchase history, lifetime value, website cookies, etc. of the customers.
Buyer personas will help you to develop a successful marketing strategy.
Collecting a proper database also helps in analyzing the areas where you need to work in building a stronger customer base.
3) Competitor Analysis-
In this case, follow the I T R technique that follows identify, track & record method.
- Identify-Go around the internet and find out all your relevant competitors on various platforms. Now one major thing to remember while going about this process is that consider competitors of every scale be it small or large.
- Track-Your competitors are your best friends! They may be coming up with a new activity every month, every week, or even every day. So, be wise! Take note of the activities of your competitors and try deducing the purpose behind each activity.
- Record-Maintain an account of ventures your competitors come up with so that you do not miss out on any new prospect.
Look at the picture below to have a complete vision of how to go about competitor analysis-
4) Regular brainstorming with your employees-
If you work and act alone then for sure you are running a race in which you will never win. Before taking any decision you literally need to sit with your employees and make a list of their ideas. Certainly, working in coordination with your teammates is something that can take you to places as ideas from others give direction to your raw thought bubbles. In an atmosphere of discussion where almost everyone wants to prove a point, you can act smart and take notice of the way each of your employees propagates his idea in an urge to be heard. In addition, make sure that every idea is heard. Further, you can at least appear to be considering everyone’s idea and jot down the striking points.
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5) Plan to use new techniques-
‘Going out of the box’ is certainly the key. Make sure that you always have an urge to incorporate new technologies into your business system.
The newest technology which is a must for businesses these days is Marketing Automation.
Why Marketing Automation?
Check out the frequently asked question based on marketing automation here. To answer why Marketing Automation, I would simply take the aid of the following 3 points-
- Marketing Automation helps in better Customer Relationship Management by segmenting customers based on Recency, Frequency & Monetary parameters.
- It helps to send automated e-mails that save a lot of time and effort.
- Marketing Automation tools like HubSpot and Mautic help to create marketing campaigns based on the ongoing market scenario. Check out Cedcommerce’s Hubspot Ecommerce Integration.
6) Draft down multiple strategies & carry out A/B testing
After executing the above-mentioned steps, formulate and jot down various marketing strategies with a clear aim to-
- Help your audiences
- Generate more leads
- Have a better conversion rate
- Achieve sustainable growth patterns
Apart from drafting the marketing strategy, you need to make sure that you do not stay stuck on a particular strategy if that isn’t fetching your results.
So, what to do?
Keep analyzing your marketing strategy by having a record of the lead generation & lead conversion rate. Thus, if the results achieved do not coincide with the set targets then move on to the next strategy with an aim to do better. This is what is known as A/B testing.
7) Above all, have a Proper Plan to Promote your strategy & fetch feedback-
If you have a well-tested strategy but fail to efficiently promote your strategy and work verticals related to it, you will not be able to use your strategy to its full potential. After having promoted something, you surely would want to know what people have to say about it. Right? So, do not hesitate to have feedback on your strategy.
The feedback can come from the following group of people-
- Employees- Of course, they were there while you were in the planning process. But, the executed version of anything is always different from the planned version. Therefore, you need to ask your employees whether the executed strategy meets their expectations or not.
- Competitors- Maintain a healthy relationship with at least a few of your rivals so that they can help you in knowing the pros and cons of your marketing strategy. Moreover, this will give you some very good direction to help you improve your strategy.
- Customers- Customers are everything. Thus, making your customers a part of your business strategy will make them feel important and recognized. This will help in building a personalized relationship with them so that you build a better customer base by enhancing the trust of your customers.
Closing Words:
Although, it is very important to plan and develop a marketing strategy yet more than that you need to stay mentally flexible to-
- Include others in your planning process
- A/B test your planning strategy
- Welcome feedbacks
Prepare, Plan & Prosper!
Happy Marketing!