The 3 Marketing Steps Most Companies Forget
When companies consider their marketing strategy, most plans are commonly built around delivering the best possible social media engagement and visiting a handful of relevant trade exhibitions throughout the year. Naturally, this is an unfair caricature. But the understanding of marketing is entirely focused on reaching out to the market and ignores other important elements of the trade. It is not uncommon for a business to choose to add PPC advertising to their strategy because they have spotted an ad from their main competitor and wanted to respond aggressively. Admittedly, this form of marketing is not synonymous with success: It involves little research, little strategic thinking and is often designed as a matter of emergency with no consideration for the existing yearly plan. However, the main reason why there is no consideration of the year plan is that there is no defined year plan. Here are ways to design a killer marketing strategy.
Define what your position is
Your marketing strategy is designed to support your revenue growth. As a result, it is essential to begin the marketing strategy with a complete analysis of your situation: In marketing terms, this is called the SWOT – Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat – analysis. It focusses on the position of your company in the market and highlights areas for your strategy to target. Additionally, a SWOT analysis needs to be prepared alongside the PEST – Political, Economic, Social and Technological movements – market review to identify the context in which your products or services appear. The combined analysis is essential to address all new market and competition issues effectively.
The SWOT analysis is often overlooked
Put your trust in the best helpers
There is nothing in a marketing strategy that says that you should work on your own. In-house activities might seem more attractive at first because it appears more cost-effective, but choosing expert providers to help you with marketing projects is the guarantee of getting the best possible results. From a marketing perspective, it’s important to consider working with an ecommerce agency if you are an online retailer, an SEO agency – for all online content visibility –, a design agency to create a personal brand feeling, a content agency to generate regular new content – this can be your SEO agency too –, and a digital development agency to ensure that your website is always on top. As a rule of the thumb, any project that doesn’t require a full-time specialist job in-house can be delegated to a specialist agency.
Maximize advocacy and positive endorsements
Advocacy and positive endorsements is a gray area that small businesses tend to ignore. The with strategy, for instance, is a way of creating a positive endorsement feeling by associating a celebrity with a business expert such as the CEO of a startup. Another form of positive endorsement is to extend a celebrity’s image to give new qualities to a brand – such as Emma Watson giving Burberry a clean, trendy and smart image. Similarly, customers can positively endorse your brand by telling their success story with it. This is a case of strategic endorsement, or, put in other words, a way of using existing customers to attract new customers.
