Author:
Twenty3Media
Kick start your business’ marketing
It’s the beginning of a new year and for many businesses this means designing a revised or new marketing strategy. If you’re struggling to get started with your strategy for the year, here are a few tips to get you going.
Stick with what worked
Review last year’s strategy and highlight the marketing tactics that showed ROI. Can you implement those tactics again this year? Also look at why they were successful. Is there something similar that you can do? Perhaps you ran a print advert for a special promotion and received great feedback. Think of more promotional ideas that can generate leads for your business.
Explore new marketing channels
Whilst we said ‘stick to what worked’ in the previous point it is important to always be on the lookout for new marketing channels and opportunities to explore. Have you ventured online yet? Online marketing include an array of channels, from a website to email marketing to social media. If you have a website, is the website up-to-date with the correct contact details and relevant information? Many consumers turn to search engines these days when researching new products and / or services and it is most likely that your website is going to be their first point of contact with your brand.
Consider partnerships
This may not be suitable for all businesses but for many service-based businesses this is a potentially lucrative lead generation tool. Identify other non-competitive businesses that you can form partnerships with, preferably a business that you can also send leads to. It’s not called a partnership for nothing!
Be specific about your marketing tactics
Your annual strategy should be comprehensive and include an analysis of your internal processes, your competitors’ activities and your target market among others but when it comes to the marketing tactics you’re going to deploy throughout the year, be as specific as possible. For instance, if you’re going to implement a print advertising campaign specify what the marketing message of each advert should be, what information should be included in the advert and so forth.
Implementation plan
While brainstorming and finalizing your marketing tactics, start working on an implementation plan. For our clients we recommend a comprehensive implementation plan looking at monthly and weekly actions that needs to take place in order to ensure that the overall marketing and business goals are achieved.
Creating a strategy, determining the marketing mix you’re going to use and setting out an implementation plan is a time consuming process but if done thoroughly it will act as a marketing map that can be used throughout the year by your marketing team.
A marketing strategy is a must-have but the success of the strategy will depend on the execution of the strategy (and the consistency of the execution). Keep in mind that your business’ marketing execution is a continuous process and ideally you should work on your marketing on a daily basis. If you have any marketing questions, feel free to ask us!
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-tips-articles/kick-start-your-business-marketing-4125823.html
About the Author
Twenty3Media is a Cape Town-based marketing agency specialising in integrated marketing solutions for small businesses. Services include marketing audits, competitor research and analysis and the creation and implementation of marketing strategies.