09.13.06
Defining Your Marketing Strategy
Defining your marketing strategy is, without a doubt, an essential element needed to sustain the ong-term success of your business. Surprisingly though, most entrepreneurs and new business owners do not have one. Or, they have taken the time to create one, but fail to follow it. What’s the point in that?
A marketing strategy is not to be confused with a marketing plan. They are not the same thing. A marketing strategy requires selecting a realistic, measurable, and ambitious goal that you think your business can achieve on a sustainable basis. Each marketing tactic you employ will be focused on reaching and exceeding that goal. With a marketing plan, you are outlining the tactics, actions, and timetable that will be used to achieve your overall strategic goal outlined in your marketing strategy. In short, the plan details what you will do to make that strategic marketing goal happen.
One of the first steps in developing your strategy is to set your ultimate goal which obviously will be different for every business. Regardless of what it is, your marketing strategy should drive everything that your business does to achieve that objective. Unfortunately, there is no magic formula for creating the right strategy, but there are several key factors that can point you down the right road. You can start by identifying who your customers or target prospects are, where they are located; what they want and need, why they need it, how they need it, and when they need it.
Answering these questions will assist you in creating a unique marketing strategy which you can test, analyze and implement. Yes, I said test. Very few businesses nail it right out of the gate. By testing your strategy on a defined portion of your market, you can analyze its effectiveness, tweak it if necessary, and then implement it when you think you’ve got it right.
The implementation of your strategy will (and should) be an ongoing process of creating a plan to satisfy your customers; testing it; and learning from it. You can learn from it by recognizing what is right and doing more of it, or changing what is wrong as soon as you realize it wasn’t working.
