Marketing strategy plus plan equals targeted enquiries

Canny businesses with tight budgets succeed through planned, effective, focused activity.

The old adage that if you cast your net wide enough you’ll catch something, doesn’t like to make a big thing of its major flaw; that you might not want what you catch. And it also doesn’t highlight the further downside of that, which is that you risk irritating a lot of people in the process. That isn’t great for any brand. So… canny businesses don’t follow that adage with their marketing. Instead, they have vision, they research, they think, they plan, they implement, and they review.

If that all sounds like hard work, of course you can always just keep casting a net out wide. There’s no doubt that very occasionally a business will enjoy a modicum of success through luck alone.

However, if you’re not content to just keep your fingers crossed and hope for the best, then thinking through your marketing strategy and marketing plan is definitely a better way forward.

The right strategy and plan will attract the right customers

What do we mean by the right customers? We mean those customers who have a specific need for your product or service. They may already by researching, or they may only have just begun to realise they need you because you’ve caught their eye. But either way, you can be sure they’re shaping up to be a good fit from the start if they connect and engage with your messaging and brand. And that gives you something to work with properly and not waste time. Sound good? We think so too. So how do you achieve this?

Starting with the vision

The thing is, it’s not possible to decide what marketing actions you should take until you know what you’re trying to achieve. Thus you need to work out your strategy first. And to even be able to come up with a strategy, you need a baseline objective to shoot for. Let’s use a generic example to illustrate what we mean.

Say you’re launching a new product or service as part of a portfolio of other products or services. Naturally, your objective will be to enable your brand to reach a new intended audience. Only once you’ve nailed that can you then build your strategy by working out what that audience actually looks like, what their needs, tastes, and values are, how your new product meets their needs and solves their problems, and what your competitors are up to.

By working through an effective marketing strategy in this way, you will come to have a clear idea of where your brand is positioned in its market. And it is then for your marketing plan to pick the right channels to reach your market, set out various campaigns to engage with those people, and ideally guide them towards a buying decision.

Focused thought, consideration, and discussion is never time wasted

Apart from dropping the casting a wide net ploy, if one also accepts that developing a good marketing strategy and then plan can take time, it’s worth noting that such a constructive process can never be wasted time. To find those golden customers we referred to at the start, you need a clear picture of what they look like, where they ‘hang out’, and how their world ticks. Basically, you want to be able to pluck ‘em out of the water on a line rather than having to cast out a wide and indiscriminate net.

But that’s just the start of it. Once you have that picture clear in your mind, you need to work on the messages that will engage and get them to bite. How does your product solve their problems? How do they want to be reminded of those problems? How do you show (not tell) them that you’re the company to choose?

And then, of course, you have to plan for how to actually reach them. Which channels will work best, when, and how? Are they online a lot? Are they more likely to read a printed leaflet? Would they respond better to word of mouth? Whatever the answer is to those, and many more, questions, you’ll then need to decide how you present them with the necessary content to do the job.

That all sounds grand, however, as always, there’s a lot more to this than meets the eye. Budgets, timescales, resources, and capacity all come into it. Regular reviews of how campaigns are performing are critical. And if something isn’t working, however enthusiastic your team were about it in the first place… you need to change it.

Turning to experienced experts for advice and help

We mentioned near the beginning that we know this can all sound like a lot of hard work. In truth, that’s because it is. But hard work and time put in at the beginning do pay massive dividends later on. So if you’re worried you can’t dedicate enough time to doing what’s needed, or you simply don’t know where to start, it makes a lot of sense to work with a company like Bubble who work on these things day in, day out. We have an abundance of energy and ideas. We do have the time. And we’ve got enough experience to know what works, why it works, how it can work differently, and what can go wrong. Avoiding expensive mistakes is just as important as having a plan in the first place. But that sounds like the subject of another blog in the future, so we’ll leave it that…

Want your brand and marketing to connect properly with your target audience?

Call 01327 223808. We’ll help you engage with the crowd.

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