Your marketing efforts are only as successful as the energy output into temperature. The reality is that marketing isn't a one-size-fits-all solutions-all solution that works like it did days past. Modern consumers demand a more personalised and direct approach to them as individuals, and they're not as easily swayed these days by generic market messages.
By Team Savant
Image: SCREEN POS
This means that if you aren't putting any effort into cultivating the right marketing approach, your results will be less than satisfactory and most definitely will not give you a good ROI (Return on Investment). In fact, 65% of businesses don't get as good a return on digital marketing, and only 24% of small businesses in the UK saw any positive benefits from Facebook marketing. More disturbingly, Marketing Week found that 35% of respondents to their marketing survey don't even measure ROI.
So, how do you ensure that this isn't your business or that you don't make the same mistakes as others and essentially throw away good money on a marketing campaign that is worth what you're putting into it?
It Starts with A Goal
Like any endeavour, progress and change, you require a goal. A marketing campaign is no different. You have the power to set a measurable and realistic goal for your marketing approach. Do you aim to attract a specific number of new customers this quarter? Or perhaps you're focused on boosting revenue, raising awareness, or achieving other objectives? The choice is yours, and the goal is your starting point. This sense of control over your marketing strategy can be empowering.
The best marketing approaches have a predetermined goal that businesses hope to achieve because this allows them to tailor their output to meet this demand. For example, suppose you're promoting a new product launch. In that case, your marketing will be different than if you're raising awareness of your charitable efforts or want to promote a seasonal sale.
Before you do anything else, set a goal. This is your starting point, your North Star, and it will guide you through the rest of your marketing journey.
Understand Your Customers
The cornerstone of a successful marketing campaign is understanding your customers; chances are, you're not fully utilising the wealth of data at your disposal. Studies suggest that up to 80% of business data is underutilised, often due to a lack of knowledge on accessing or interpreting it.
Understanding your customers is key to a successful marketing campaign. You need to know them as well as you know yourself. Who are they? What are they looking for? What resonates with them? Where do you fit into their lives? How much are they willing to spend? What turns them off? Their ages, locations, income brackets, and more. The more you understand your customers, the more your marketing campaign will resonate with them, fostering a sense of connection and empathy and ultimately, driving better results.
The more you understand your customers, the more effective your marketing campaign will be. This knowledge will inspire you to create a marketing strategy that resonates with your audience.
Perform an Analysis
Performing an analysis allows you to uncover more data and information that will be invaluable for your marketing campaign. Firstly, look at your company's internal performance. What are your strengths and weaknesses and your current marketing position?
From here, you can examine external factors such as trends, overall market performance, consumer behaviours, etc. The more pictures you build of your market and your options in it, the more you can alter your marketing message to account for these factors.
It can also be a good idea to do this for your competitors to see where they're excelling or struggling and how you can exploit this to your advantage.
Know Your Product
Confidence in your product is key to successful marketing. After all, how can you sell something if you don't fully understand what you're selling? Take the time to fully understand your product and why consumers need it, whether it's an established product or a new offering. This understanding will give you the confidence to market your product effectively, making your marketing efforts more secure and assured.
Take the time to fully understand what you're selling and why consumers need your product or service, whether it's established or not.
It can be a good idea here to familiarise yourself with the '4 P's of Marketing', a fundamental concept in marketing strategy. These are Product, Price, Promotion, and Place, and they play a crucial role in shaping your marketing approach.
Product — Know your product, what it does, what it offers, and how it meets your customers' needs.
Price — What are you charging, how does it compare to the rest of the market, and how are you justifying the price point?
Promotion — How will you market the product, what are the best places to promote it, and how does this tie in with your brand identity message?
Place — the place where you sell your product is also essential when it comes to marketing. Are you selling only online or via a physical outlet? Or are you selling both ways?
Look At Marketing Techniques
At this point, you need to identify the types of marketing suitable for your goals and objectives, your product or service, and your customers. What do they respond well to? What are you looking to achieve, and what methods can deliver these results? You need to understand the options available so you can work from there.
Look at the different traditional marketing methods you have available, including billboards, TV and radio advertising, print advertising, leaflets, and more, to help you understand the options that will work best for you.
Then, look at the different digital marketing methods that can help you achieve your objectives and create the right strategy for your needs. These could include creating engaging content for your website, building external links to increase your online visibility, leveraging social media platforms for brand promotion, or using email marketing to reach out to potential customers, among others.
Choose Your Techniques
Once you know what marketing avenues suit you, your audience, your business, and your goals, you can work through your options to cultivate the perfect marketing approach. This process will lead you to a detailed marketing plan to keep you organised and prepared for the journey ahead.
You might find that a blend of traditional marketing approaches works well for you. Let's say you're setting up an online or mail-order store and want to send out brochures with your products on them. Then, you need to identify if this is relevant for your audience; statistics suggest that your marketing to those born in the 80s or early 90s responds better to direct mail than other age groups. If this is relevant, you can then look into low cost book printing to design and print your brochures instead of doing this first only to find out if your target audience doesn't respond well.
On the other hand, if your market is the younger generations, you need to develop a robust marketing approach for your social media accounts, using short video content to help appeal to them and, their preferences in marketing and the type of media they consume.
Set a Budget
Your budget needs to cover all of your marketing resources, and this isn't an area you should skimp on. General guidelines suggest that businesses should invest anywhere from 2 to 25% of their revenue in their marketing.
Data suggests that B2B businesses spend around 2 to 5% annually on marketing, while B2C businesses spend 5 to 10%, and those with revenue targets of over 50% generally spend around 15 to 30% of their revenue on marketing.
Your marketing budget must be relevant to your business size, projected revenue and aims. There are ways to cut costs on marketing and save some money without reducing the quality of your marketing, but you should expect to require a hefty investment to really create the perfect marketing campaign.
Create A Plan
Now that you have all of the data and information you need, you can create a marketing plan and timeline that will detail what you're doing, how you're doing it, and how it will roll out. You need to have a definitive plan to help you meet targets and get your marketing campaign released with as much impact as possible.
The creation of your marketing plan needs to look a little something like this,
Define your audience
Detail how you’ll reach your audience
Define how you will create the required marketing materials
Know how you share your marking materials
Know how you will analyse the results
This part accumulates the above points and involves your understanding of how you are going to realistically use the data and details you have applied from the above steps. Knowing who you are marking to and the approach you will take, creating the required materials, and sharing them publicly to achieve the results you are looking for is vital.
Lastly, you must always check and recheck your marketing to ensure it meets your needs. Analysing results, making changes, and ditching ineffective approaches should be something you do proactively as a standard to avoid wasting money or falling into the trap of not being able to grow or move forward with your business.