Effective marketing strategies are vital for the growth of your business. Marketing is a valuable way to keep your sales team busy by providing new leads and keeping potential clients engaged with your business.
Often, marketing strategies focus on short-term targets like clients coming to a website. However, there are long-term goals that a great strategy can accomplish. These include continuous contact with leads, creating an audience for a product or service, and engaging with potential leads until they are ready to reach out to sales.
An effective marketing strategy would create both short-term and long-term results.
How to Build a Marketing Strategy for Business Growth
When you consider marketing strategies, your mind likely goes straight to social media ads, SEO, or capturing emails with a freebie. These are the tools that many businesses immediately reach for when seeking a go-to marketing plan.
While the above may be great tools, they don’t make up a comprehensive strategy.
Here is a brief “how-to” for building a marketing strategy that works for your business:
Set Short Term and Long Term Goals
What are you hoping to accomplish in the short term – and the long term? Name the goals you’d like to reach before you begin thinking about how to achieve them.
List Your Resources
Most businesses already have many, many marketing resources that are already available. You may have had successful campaigns that could be reused or slightly modified. You might have a ton of blog posts that could be reshaped into newsletters. You may have videos that just need to be uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo.
On top of all of this content, you also have resources like mailing lists, email lists, networking contacts, social media accounts, your websites, and more.
Review What Has Worked in the Past
Understanding marketing metrics is vitally important to making decisions about the strategy you will use. Take a look at what has worked in the past and what has connected with clients.
If you aren’t sure or don’t feel you have enough data, survey your clients and find out where they heard about you, where they go to find services like yours, and how they qualify businesses to ensure they are trustworthy. This is all vital information you can use in your plan.
Plan Ahead
Now that you have all of this information, it’s time to create your strategy. Decide where you want to spend marketing dollars and – this is vital – how you will track the success or failure of any given campaign.
Execute the Strategy
Get your team on board with executing the strategy. Each team member should have specific steps assigned to them. From there, processes and procedures can be created around each step to ensure efficient execution.
Stay Agile
Remember, you have steps in your plan which will allow you to track success or failure. If a piece of the strategy isn’t working, it’s time to go back to the drawing board with your team and decide if marketing time and money need to be spent on a different part of the plan or if the strategy needs to be modified. Just because you have it written down doesn’t mean that it is set in stone.
Building and executing an effective marketing strategy can give your business the boost it needs for years to come. Contact Business Success Consulting Group to get the assistance you need as you work to implement a new marketing strategy.
