Main Areas

Main Areas of Marketing Strategies

The starting points of your marketing strategies are simple: really understanding your business.

Good news is that if you are reading this then you are probably a business owner, a business director or someone looking to start a business.  If that is the case, then the vision you have for your business is the starting point of your marketing.
Key thoughts to consider

• How do you measure the return from your marketing budget?
• Can you easily describe your product or service?
• Who are your customers?
• What benefits do your product/service provide to your customers?
• Who do you want your customers to be?
• What would the ideal customer look like?
• Do you know how many customers you actually have?
• Do you know how many potential customers you have?
• Do you know what your customers think? 
• If so, does this match your expectations? 
• If not, what will you do to change these expectations.

Answering the questions above will help you on the way to developing your marketing strategy. 
The questions above aren’t the easiest to answer as you are very close to your business, so it maybe that you will need assistance on certain questions to answer or perhaps validate the answers to specific questions.

Defining your marketing budgets

As with any investment for your business, your marketing budget should be working where it will gain your business the biggest return.  
Usually a marketing budget should be set at around 7.5% of your turnover. 
Note that during the start up phase of a business, it is likely that marketing of the business and the development of the marketing ‘tool’s’ and processes, this could also involve funding some support in developing your marketing strategy.

Engagement with marketing providers

Briefing of your requirements is the key to success, this includes the selection of your marketing providers. 
Selection of your marketing provider
At the outset, research your providers before you engage with them, review their website, discuss their previous work with them.  Tell them your budget and what you want to achieve from it.
This is important, you will need a close relationship with your marketing providers as they will need to understand a lot about your business to help you meet your objectives. 

Briefing the chosen provider/s

You need to define exactly what you want to achieve from each marketing provider you employ.   This is the best way to do it.

• Ask your selected marketing provider to provide you with their briefing template (if they don’t have one, then I’d ask why)
• You fill in the bits you believe to be relevant and then hand it back.
• Ask to sign off the final brief before any further development is conducted.  This will  ensure that you are happy that the brief is correct, hence will save you time and money. 

If you are still unsure then marketing advice is available. We offer business to business free marketing advice in the North East.

Integrated Marketing

I’ve purposely made the marketing provider statement plural as you may need to employ specialists in specific areas as part of your marketing strategy.
When more than one marketing ‘channel’ is used, this is termed as an ‘integrated marketing’ campaign. 
A typical integrated campaign could combine TV, with press advertising direct mail advertising, and banner online advertising – all pushing the same message to the same target audience, but making it as relevant as possible through the different mediums used.
Things to be aware of if you need to employ several marketing providers…

• Consistency of Brief- ensure that to define your marketing objective to each provider. 
• Consistency of Message- to ensure consistency of message across the marketing providers you employ so beware of this consistency is a critical success tool of an integrated marketing campaign. 

Key to success

PLANNING 
As part of the development of your marketing strategy, Before you start set out the plan of when things need to happen and then ensure that the messages are issued through your marketing providers at the correct time.  For example, time your press campaign to occur the same time as your online campaign, add a small delay for direct communications to add some extra impact to the earlier messages.

TARGETING
Make sure that you understand the customers of your business.  Use this understanding to find more future customers.  They are very likely to have a similar profile.

RELEVANCE
‘Would you send all of your friends a birthday card with the same message on the same day?”
Make sure that the messages you send them are as relevant as possible to a) their currently known needs, and b) their potential future needs.
Test your assumptions whenever, and wherever possible

TESTING

Ensure that you test your strategies and subsequent campaigns.  Here’s a suggestion of how to do this.
a) Set reasonable and realistic expectations from the campaign. 
b) Test these assumptions.  For example, if you plan a national campaign over a month, then test it regionally for a week and then review the responses. 
c) Review the response to the test.  Amend the campaign where necessary and test again.
d) Once you are happy with the test responses – hit the GO button.

For further marketing advice or to access business to business free marketing advice from the Business Advice Centre North East click on the link below.