Growing a startup is not so easy. First, you need a viable idea to get your boat sailing. From there you need to find a profitable niche, determine the target demographic and have something valuable to sell.
Whether you are peddling goods, services, commodities or information, getting the word out to the world has become a tedious and burdensome task to accomplish. And without an apt marketing strategy to fuel your business and churn huge profits, keeping the boat afloat and moving is virtually impossible.
However, finding a marketing strategy that is the right fit is nearly impossible for many organizations. If you are facing the same issue, join the fray. The truth is that most entrepreneurs are so busy working “in” their businesses that they forget to work “on” their businesses. As a result, they fail to decide on a befitting marketing strategy for their organization.
So, what does it take to establish the right marketing scheme to save your ship from hitting the rock bottom? The secret to all this lies in our guide to 8 marketing tactics. Build a great action plan, become competitive, stay relevant and increase your customer base manifold by arming yourself with these 8 tactics!
Let us get started!
Tactics to develop a marketing strategy
Before jumping directly to creating a whole new marketing strategy, it is extremely important to dissect your previous ones. Identify the areas that need improvement and the areas which are worth investing time in. Take a good, hard look at your existing strategies to determine the things that are working and the things that are not working. Ponder on each area carefully and make a list of everything. Hopefully, your team has been tracking KPI’s, so this step won’t be too difficult to follow than usual.
Businesses define and communicate their goals, vision, and mission by setting some objectives. These objectives should be nothing but specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-oriented that can help individuals evaluate the success of a particular marketing strategy.
They aid the marketers and managers to align their plans, coordinate marketing efforts and hold the teams accountable for achieving particular results.
Furthermore, these objectives should be re-evaluated at the duration of every six months, updated if necessary and used to measure success.
Your value proposition is arguably the most critical element of your overall marketing scheme. It tells the prospects as to why they should choose you over your competitors and it also makes the benefits offered by your goods and services crystal clear from the very onset. So a great marketing strategy is one that is derived from the company’s value proposition, encapsulating its primary strength analysis and differentiators against contenders, as opposed to being created from the very scratch.
Determining the value proposition is the step that should be most focused upon. Also, it is the step that requires most of your time, investment and resources as it is the most important conversion factor that decides whether the sale will be closed or lost altogether.
Get started with defining this conversion factor using pre-made value proposition PowerPoint templates that are available all through the internet.
Using Virtual Reality tactics can make a huge difference to your marketing efforts. It is the biggest trend in the business and marketing world. Being able to provide your consumers with an augmented reality experience helps them understand the usefulness and adaptability of a product. It also helps them understand the benefits of the product and how it can make their lives convenient. For Eg- Adidas: Delicatessen. When Adidas partnered with Somewhere Else to show the journey of two mountain climbers using a VR device. The viewers could actually scale the journey of the climbers from rock to rock. This VR campaign made TERREX far more appealing to the user than its onset. The 360-degree view of Delicatessen changed the fate of TERREX- the line of outdoor apparel and accessories.
To embed customer’s needs and seek their involvement in your product, you need to first understand them; their likes and dislikes.
In the marketing arena, there’s been a whole lot of buzz regarding customer-centricity- the importance of fundamentally aligning your goods and services to the needs of your most valuable customer.
In this quest of getting to know the customers, traditional marketing is getting a setback whereas social platforms are getting more popular owing to their user-friendliness. The organization can easily get information on customer demographics, conversations and online behavior which was not possible otherwise with traditional market research. The more personalized information the company can acquire, the more the trust of the customers. It also shows them that your company values their patronage.
Big data is critical to building an apt marketing strategy. It is vital to know how to employ it to return the information that you require to market properly as per the trend and industry tactics. It is also necessary to run complete analytics on the company’s biggest opponent and evaluate what they are doing differently to market their products. What you can learn from them and how it can help you improve your marketing efforts. Numbering and scouring profitable avenues for comparative data will yield you better results.
It is important to keep a tab on your direct competitors. It is also equally important to determine the marketing tactics they use and look for trends in their sales inclines and declines. Analyze the pattern of their sales and determine what they are doing differently that you can imitate to take your marketing efforts a notch higher. Learn what does not yield them positive results and create innovative strategies to make their weakness your brand’s strongest point.
Keep an eye on your competitor’s target audience and if they work for your product too, develop strategies to draw their attention with improving reputation, highlighting your brand’s USP and improving your customer service.
You can’t ignore social media when it comes to marketing. This is where all the so-called magic begins and spreads. In fact, some businesses owe their success to social media. They are built solely on the backs of social media channels such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc.
It might seem quite intimidating at first. But once you get a hang of it, there is no looking back! The key here is to be authentic, post “your” thoughts and post anything that is of relevance to your audience and your business. Keep the momentum going!
Armed with these 8 tactics outlined above, you should have an ample amount of ammunition to maximize the ROI of your next marketing initiative.
So, begin. Focus on numbers and get your ROI maximized.
Use these 8 tactics to transform your next marketing campaign and your business as well!
