If you own a business, you’ve probably heard about a marketing strategy many times. Apparently, you may have a general understanding of what is a marketing strategy and why it is important for your business growth. However, not all entrepreneurs know what they should and should not do while developing a marketing strategy. So, how to develop marketing from scratch that will work the best for your business?

Developing Marketing Strategy: Do’s

You have to understand that, in the modern world, digital marketing is much more preferable than the traditional one. However, it may depend on the customers’ needs and their pains because, sometimes, customers make purchases impulsively. It’s quite obvious as most modern audiences spend a great deal of their time on the Internet. That’s why, nowadays, digital marketing is a real solution for big and small businesses. Here are the steps that you should take to develop a digital marketing strategy.

Step 1. Create your customer’s persona

In order to build a good working marketing strategy that will attract potential customers to your product, you have to create your customer’s persona. It means that you should know your audience’s needs, preferences, and pains. Your buyer persona should be specific; that is, you should outline as many specific features of your potential buyers as possible. Your buyers’ personae should be based on research using tools such as Google Analytics or Facebook’s Audience Insights. However, it would be even better if you contact your target audience directly and ask them as many questions as possible. Make sure that you have your own map of empathy for your customers. That is, you know what they know, how they feel, what are their basic requirements, and needs. All in all, a buyer persona is as important as business objectives when developing a marketing strategy.

Step 2. Decide on positioning

Positioning refers to your ability to influence customers’ perception of your product or service. The basic goal of a positioning strategy is to build a solid image of your brand in customers’ minds. A positioning strategy may focus on different aspects of your services such as cost, quality, flexibility, speed, etc.

You should have a clear plan of how to show your product to potential customers, and emphasize your advantages as compared to your competitors.

Step 3. Determine what you want to accomplish

The third step in developing a marketing strategy is figuring out what you want your marketing campaigns to achieve. In fact, there are multiple aims for a marketing campaign. For instance, you may want to build a brand name, to get more sales, or to generate leads. Meanwhile, you have to realize that your goals should be high but achievable.

Step 4. Understand the market funnel

As soon as you’ve figured out the end goals of your marketing strategy, you have to grasp the concept of digital marketing funnel. This concept includes the stages through which customers go before making a decision to purchase a product. Digital marketing funnel includes:

• discovery: people learn about your product;
• research and consideration during which your potential customers want to learn more about your products, proactively search for reviews and other information, compare your product with competitors’ ones;
• Purchase;
• Customers’ return, and loyal customers.

Step 5. Choose tactics, tools, and channels for promotion strategy

Once you know exactly your audience, how you want your audience to react on your product, and how you want to position it, you may start using specific tactics that will help you reach your end goals. There are multiple channels, which you can use to implement your promotion strategy. Apart from widely used social media, you can use partnership opportunities or referral platforms for advertising.

What you shouldn’t do while developing a marketing strategy?

There are several mistakes startups usually make, that are crucial for their marketing strategy. Once you’ve done all do’s, don’t forget to check your strategy for don’ts. They may dramatically affect all the efforts for the perfect strategy.

1. Do not start until you have explored your audience

Prior to starting your marketing campaign, you should know who is your target audience. Being specific about your target market and target audience gives you an opportunity to send the right messages to the right people. For instance, if you are a software development provider, you have to know what are your potential customers’ needs (ex. To get high-quality products at a minimum cost). Only then, you can start building your message.

2. Do not spend much cost at the beginning of your marketing strategy

One of the biggest mistakes of many service providers spending too much costs at the beginning of one’s marketing campaign. Developing a content marketing strategy is a long and complicated process. There are high chances that you will try out several marketing strategies before you actually know what works the best.

3. Do not post too many articles at once

Of course, you have to always post fresh content; however, too many articles at once will play a low-down trick with you. It would be much better for you to post several articles during a couple of weeks so that you have enough time to promote them on social media.

4. Do not put too much effort into blogging

Indeed, blogging may be an effective marketing tool, you need to provide various types of content to your audience. You can include infographics, social media posts, create podcasts or YouTube videos, and much more.

5. Do not focus too much on selling

While the end goal of your marketing campaign is to sell your product, emphasize in your content marketing what benefits your potential customers will have from your product.

Conclusion

A marketing strategy is one of the key elements of your business success. A good working marketing strategy is what will help you to raise your brand awareness.

Having your customer’s persona, a positioning strategy, and an effective marketing strategy will significantly increase your company’s chances for success!