As a marketing consultant, I work with hundreds of clients per year. I would venture to guess that a very high percentage, in the high 90 percentile range, do not have an effective marketing strategy. Many people mistake marketing methods and tools for a marketing strategy. It goes without saying but this is the reason many people fail in their marketing efforts. Though some people get lucky and succeed without it, seldom can anyone succeed without an effective marketing strategy. So what is a marketing strategy? Let’s start by defining what it is not.
A marketing strategy is not being on Facebook. A marketing strategy is not being on Twitter or other social sites. A marketing strategy is not sending out press releases to lists of uninterested parties. It is not being listed on marketing sites or any of the other things most think of as a marketing strategy. These are just methods and tools. These tools are used to IMPLEMTENT the underlying marketing strategy.
A valid marketing marketing strategy entails:
A. Determining how many people comprise your potential buying profiles
B. Clearly defining who they are -age, gender, income range, geographic area, likes, dislikes ETC.
C. Determining what style of message will cause them to buy
D. Branding and positioning your business as the ‘go-to’ resource that will provide what your potential buyers feel they need
E. Developing a clear message written in your buyer’s style of language, that will convince the buyer that you have what they need, while increasing their motivation to buy it from you
F. Making it easy for them to find you first on the Internet, as today marketing necessitates a laser sharp inbound strategy
G. Determining how they prefer to be contacted and delivering the message in the manner they prefer
H. Offering your buyers specific calls to action
I. Managing the processes
During every step, you must communicate strongly and clearly. You must build lasting relationships. And you must maintain control of the process before during and after the sale.
Unfortunately many people just throw up a website, a blog, sign up for Facebook or Twitter and believe they have created a marketing plan. This is certainly not the case, but many people do this. Without a laser sharp, profile-targeted strategy, designed to produce real marketing results, these can become mere time wasters and will most likely function very inefficiently. This ‘cookie cutter’ approach will likely accomplish very little and, without an underlying strategy covering all the above, will cause the marketing efforts to appear to be scattered, unorganized and amateurish.
In addition to all of the above, in today’s Internet Marketing model, we must be able to put forth a targeted marketing message in each one of the four key areas. These are:
Search engines – as most buyers now say the Internet is their first choice for making purchasing decisions.
Traditional media – still important but only if your profiles are still reading newspapers and magazines ETC.
Social media – a very large percentage of people now participate in social media and you must be there or risk being invisible as these people are very loyal to these types of tools.
The ‘blogosphere’ – bloggers are fast becoming the new media.
The subject of creating an effective marketing plan is so broad that to attempt to address it in a single blog post would be futile. There are many free articles available on the Free Publicity Focus Group site that cover these areas in much more detail. There you will find a sign-up form for a free, no-cost no-obligation marketing strategy analysis. This report covers 22 areas and is specific to creating a working marketing strategy for your product or service.
