Which Marketing Strategy is Right for my Business?

The purpose of marketing is to link your company’s value to the appropriate consumer base. It’s a basic concept with a million distinct strategies involved. Knowing which marketing approaches are viable and which are a waste of time can help reduce costs, increase awareness, and drive consumer engagement. Therefore, understanding which marketing strategies are best suited to your business, whilst challenging, is important in the long term.

What is a Marketing Strategy?

A marketing strategy is a company’s integrated pattern of decisions that describe important choices about goods, markets, marketing activities, and marketing resources in the production, communication, and delivery of products or services, allowing the business to achieve central goals. Put simply, a marketing strategy is the overall ‘game plan’ for a business to ensure marketing-related goals are attained.

Steps To Creating a Marketing Strategy

Even for a seasoned marketer, developing a marketing strategy can be difficult. How can you know if your approach will be successful and not go against the business? Well, when trying to develop a marketing strategy, marketers should follow these three key steps below in order to ensure maximum effectiveness from each approach:

#1 – Evaluate

It is essential as a marketer looking to establish a new strategy to evaluate the current context. By considering both the internal and external settings, it is likely for your marketing plan will be built on any accessible competitive advantage. This also extends into evaluating what will best fit client demand. Market research aids in the comprehension of the larger business environment, the definition of consumer demands, and the identification of possibilities.

#2 – Formulate

The next step is to formulate a marketing strategy that directly aligns the firm’s products and services with the relevant consumer groups, whilst also designing specific marketing tactics to reach your target audience.

#3 – Implement

The final step is to implement a variety of marketing mix approaches that help to offer a stronger competitive market position. Additionally, by confirming the marketing mix, marketers are supplied with the ‘must do’ actions required to put the strategy in place to achieve the firm’s goals.

How Do You Know What Is Best for You?

A marketing strategy is developed by a company’s strengths, opportunities, and goals, and it drives the marketing plan’s more precise deliverables. Businesses develop their strategy by aligning their objectives, essential resources, and core capabilities with external opportunities and trends, as well as taking into account potential dangers. For example, certain tactics, such as television advertising, are just out of reach and do not make sense for small businesses. It is important to understand the most effective marketing strategies for each business circumstance, whether it’s B2B or B2C. Looking below, we explore some of the marketing strategies that might fit your company type.

B2B Marketing Strategies

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): SEO examines where a website appears among the top unpaid search results on search engines, such as Google, to increase awareness and traffic to specific websites. SEO creates a successful marketing strategy as it continuously adapts to stay updated with mobile and local search engines, simplifies searches for people interested in your product or service, and is a cost-effective method to maintain your brand competitive with similar-sized businesses.

• Social Media Marketing: Given 9 out of 10 B2B buyers say online content has a moderate to major effect on their purchase decisions social media marketing is important. The goal of social media marketing is to provide consumers with quality information that they want to share across their social networks, resulting in greater exposure and website traffic. This type of marketing approach lowers marketing costs while improving lead generation, provides analytics that gives businesses key market information, and “humanises” brands to promote conversions.

• Referral Programs: A referral program is a company’s systematic strategy that encourages customers to inform others about its products or services. In fact, referral strategies are specifically designed to provide quick credibility to current consumers to increase a client base. Such a strategy is successful as it leverages the suggestions of satisfied consumers and acknowledges and promotes brand loyalty.

• Content Marketing: Content marketing emphasises consumer education overselling to influence buying behaviour. This strategy is centered around generating and circulating content that is relevant to consumers’ needs and wants, helping to attract people who are most aligned with, and most likely to buy, your business’ product or service. Content marketing is effective because it gathers prospects through the sales funnel, grows brand visibility and credibility, and provides potential consumers with relevant information.

B2C Marketing Strategies

• Email marketing: Email marketing is a powerful tool for creating and converting leads. Controlled by a computer-assisted procedure that targets individual prospects and consumers, email marketing aims to influence consumers’ purchase decisions. The effectiveness of email marketing is determined by the open rates and click-through rates. Email marketing is a worthwhile investment with research showing that the average expected email marketing ROI is $42 for every $1 spent.

• Earned Media/PR: With 92% of customers admitting they trust earned media, B2C businesses can understand its benefits. Earned media is publicity generated without the use of paid advertising and can come in a variety of forms including social media or word-of-mouth. Given it cannot be purchased or possessed in the same way that traditional advertising can, earned media signals credibility and desirability to consumers.

• Direct Selling: Direct selling does exactly what its name implies: it markets and sells items to people directly. Businesses that adopt this approach develop face-to-face connections with customers by showing and selling items outside of traditional retail venues. Direct selling provides companies with several benefits including a flexible schedule, working relationships and reduced advertising costs.

• Paid Media Advertising: A paid advertising strategy is predominantly used by businesses to increase their website traffic through methods such as PPC (pay-per-click) links or keywords relating to a company’s product or service are searched. Thus, given when customers approach their purchase decision, 65% will click on a paid ad, paid media works to reach the target audience, boost content visibility and expand business reach.

Overall, knowing what strategy is best for your business first involves understanding your brand goals, target market and offering. Each company is different, and no marketing environment is the same, but understanding what strategies might best differentiate your business from others is necessary to remain competitive.

If your business wants to find out what marketing strategies will give you the greatest success, speak to our marketing consultants today.