Marketing strategy creation is essential to expanding your business. A winning plan requires conducting extensive research, setting realistic objectives, and creating strategies to reach those targets.
Setting SMART goals will help keep you on the right path and prevent scope creep (diverging from your intended path). A SMART goal should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
As the initial step of creating a marketing plan, identifying your target audience should be your top priority. Conducting market research to learn more about their demographics, interests, and pain points as well as conducting competitor analysis to find gaps or opportunities to differentiate yourself in the marketplace.
Establishing your target audience allows you to develop creative messaging that resonates with them and select the most effective marketing channels to reach them. For instance, when selling running shoes, your target audience could range from all runners or more specifically elite athletes; using specific personas allows you to tailor messaging and develop brands which reflect these audiences’ values.
Targeting your audience has never been more crucial in an age when consumers demand tailored and curated experiences with brands. Levi’s “Hotness Comes in All Shapes and Sizes” campaign alienated large portions of its target audience by showing only thin models; such mistargeting has serious negative repercussions for ROI.
2. Develop a Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
An effective USP (Unique Selling Proposition) is essential to your marketing plan. It encapsulates the value proposition for customers while setting you apart from competitors by outlining your niche market.
Finding your unique selling proposition (USP) takes some work, but its payoff can be enormously worthwhile. A strong USP can set your business apart from competitors while increasing customer retention rates.
Launch by conducting market research to uncover unmet needs and gaps in the marketplace, then review all collected information to identify your strongest differentiators.
Once you have your USP in place, run tests to gauge its performance and then make adjustments as necessary to remain competitive. Remember that your USP should be integrated into all aspects of your business from branding to return policy; the more ingrained it becomes into every element, the easier it will be for customers to remember your brand!
3. Create a Unique User Experience (UX)
Create an exceptional user experience is a key part of any marketing plan, as it can increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty as well as help to drive increased sales.
In order to provide customers with a memorable user experience, you need to first understand their needs and expectations. Conducting market research can provide useful information that you can then use to form strategies and establish budgets.
User experience (UX) design stands in stark contrast to user interface (UI), which involves screens, pages and icons. UX puts users at the center of their interaction with a product by considering aspects such as branding, design, usability and function.
By conducting online surveys to collect user feedback and explore user expectations, as well as by using sociodemographic data to segment your target audience and create user personas, you can gather important insights that can be used to design more effective websites with higher conversion rates and stronger brand reputations.
4. Focus on Engagement
In order to keep customers engaged, it’s essential that you understand their individual needs. An effective way of doing this is through engagement marketing; an approach which seeks to form meaningful relationships with users by offering quality content. Engagement marketing has become an indispensable strategy in digital marketing aimed at satisfying consumer 4.0 who value brands that offer contextual engagement.
Engaging users requires a combination of activities, from product improvements and customer service enhancements, social listening and community building. Every company and product are different; therefore identifying the most successful strategies may take some time; but the results will pay dividends both in customer loyalty and revenue growth.
By developing a marketing plan with specific goals, deliverables and timelines for each campaign, you can ensure all work aligns with your business goals. Consolidating all campaigns under a project management tool will also make tracking progress easy as it connects marketing activities directly with sales pipelines and overall business goals.