If you plan to grow your business in the new year, you need to have an excellent marketing plan in place. With so many different avenues to use online and off, getting in front of your target demographic may feel extremely complicated. Here is a marketing strategy you can use as your guidepost as to whether or not you are taking the right steps for success this year.
Use These Marketing Policies
Marketing is the method by which you promote your business or products. So, by its very nature, marketing involves getting information about your product/services in front of the people who will buy what you are selling. If your marketing message is being seen by your target demographic, your campaign is going to get sales. Therefore your marketing policies should be a) get your target demographic defined in detail and b) use all available means to get your message in front of that demographic.
What do we mean by “all available means?” We mean using social media, print campaigns, paid ads, billboards, tv spots, Q&A sessions, webinars, conferences, YouTube videos, etc, etc, etc. You want to be anywhere your target demographic congregates.
We realize that your business probably doesn’t have an unlimited marketing budget. That’s why precisely defining your target demographic is so important. If your demographic is retirees who live in Pensacola, FL, you probably don’t want to use Snapchat as your primary means of promotion. Doing a big campaign on Pinterest or Instagram may be a massive waste of money. Instead, you may want to invest that money into a billboard outside of various retirement villages in Pensacola. Your next step might be to buy an ad in the paper. These types of marketing campaigns can have an excellent return on investment when done correctly.
Measure Your Success
There are so many ways to measure the success of a campaign both online and offline that there is no longer any excuse for not doing so. If you have an offline campaign, you can assign a specific 1-800 number to that campaign, allowing you to measure who calls in from the ad you’ve placed. If you have an online campaign there are myriad metrics that can be tracked using things like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixels.
Pivot as Needed
As you run your campaign you may discover an additional target market or find that one tactic is not working while another is. It’s perfectly fine to keep your campaign dynamic, changing it according to new information as you encounter it. Just be sure to keep doing everything that has been working as you move forward. Don’t find an additional target demographic and then drop everything to now promote to them. Create a campaign for them and run it alongside your existing, successful campaigns.
Business Success Consulting Group offers marketing and sales consulting, executive coaching, and more. We are your resource for your company’s growth. Contact us today to find out how we can help your business grow bigger and more successful than ever in 2018.
