Marketing in Practice: What You Need to Know
The information provided below is for informational purposes only, is not intended to be construed as legal or any other type of professional advice or guidance and may not be accurate or suitable for your specific situation.
*Marketing essentially means creating brand awareness. This can be at a high level or in relation to specific products or services. Even the most famous brands in the world take marketing very seriously. In fact, some brands are renowned for their skill at it.
Effective marketing is often crucial to the success of small businesses. So here is a quick and simple guide to help you implement it.*
An overview of how to develop an effective marketing strategy
The basic process of developing an effective marketing strategy is as follows.
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Define your target audience
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Define your marketing goals
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Define how to measure the success of your marketing plan
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Conduct a SWOT analysis
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Develop a content plan
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Work to divert people to your own assets
Here is a more detailed look at each of these steps.
Define your target audience
When you create a product or service, define a target market for it. In other words, define who you think your potential customers are.
When you create a marketing campaign, define a target audience for it. In some cases, this may be your entire potential target market. In others, it may be a particular subset of it.
The clearer you can be about who exactly you want to reach with your marketing campaign, the easier it is for you to create an effective marketing strategy to reach them.
Define your marketing goals
Now that you know who you want to reach, define what you want to achieve when you’ve reached them.
For example, let’s say that a key performance indicator (KPI) for your business is to increase the number of new customers by a certain amount or percentage in a certain time. Your marketing should help you to progress towards meeting this KPI by generating high-quality sales leads.
By contrast, let’s say that your KPI is to retain your existing customers for as long as possible. In other words, you don’t have any expectation of increasing sales from them.
You do, however, want to ensure that when they do buy again, they buy from you, not a competitor. In this instance, your marketing is geared towards maintaining your relationship with your existing customers.
Define how to measure the success of your marketing plan
Whatever goals you set, you need an effective way to measure them. This is a key part of what makes the difference between high-level, generic goals and SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Realistic Targets).
For example, if your goal is to convert social media followers into paying customers, then measure how often specific discount codes are used. If you wish, filter your results to show how many of these sales are made to new customers.
Alternatively, if your goal is to increase engagement amongst existing customers, measure how many of your social media followers progress to signing up for your email marketing.
Define your goals and your measurement system before you create your marketing plan. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, this may help you to stay focused on your desired outcomes when you create your plan. Secondly, it may help you to avoid the temptation to set the outcomes to suit the plan, rather than the other way around.
Conduct a SWOT analysis
A SWOT analysis is an analysis of your current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. In other words, it’s a clear and detailed overview of the starting point for your marketing campaign. It should therefore play a key role in informing your marketing strategy.
The main reason you should define your target audience and marketing goals before you undertake your SWOT analysis is that these may influence your SWOT analysis.
For example, if you’re trying to reach younger people, then having a popular account on TikTok could be a major strength. If you want to reach older businesspeople, it probably has little to no relevance. By contrast, a thriving account on a social media platform like LinkedIn could be a significant asset.
Develop a content plan
By this point you should know:
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who you want to reach
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what you want to do when you’ve reached them
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how to measure the success of your marketing
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the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of your current position
Be aware of what your competitors are doing. Learning about your competition should have been part of your original market analysis. Monitoring your competition should be an ongoing part of your efforts to increase brand awareness for your small business or to promote your products/services.
At this point, convert this knowledge into a specific content plan. Here is a quick guide to the steps to follow.
Choose your marketing platform
One point to emphasize here is that there is a difference between a marketing platform and a social media platform. In fact, theoretically, marketing does not have to involve using social media at all. For most small businesses, effectively leveraging social media is likely to be key to cost-effective marketing.
Choose your first platform on social media
The key to leveraging social media effectively is to choose the right platform for your goals. This is generally the platform your potential customers use most. If you have a choice of platforms, choose the one that is best for the type of content you want to produce.
Create a business profile on it
Use a business profile on social media. Firstly, even if you’re running a small business with a personal touch, it’s still a business and needs to be registered as such. Secondly, if you have a business account on social media, you generally get access to more advanced analytics than you do with a personal account.
Start testing content
Unfortunately, there is no standard formula for engaging social media content. In fact, this rather goes against the basic principle of social media. Social media is supposed to be a place where people and small businesses are their authentic selves. It’s not meant to be a place where people follow standardized content templates.
There are, however, a couple of useful guidelines to follow. Firstly, all social media content should deliver value in some way. This generally means that it should entertain, educate or inspire.
Secondly, all social media content should deliver some form of a story if at all possible. This can be as simple as presenting a problem, showing the steps you took to solve the problem and then showing the final solution.
Thirdly, all social media content should be authentic. This is particularly important with social media content for small businesses. Modern customers typically strongly dislike anything that even hints at businesses massaging the truth to make themselves more appealing.
Do more of what works
Once you’ve been posting social media content for a while, you’ll get an idea of what works for your audience and what doesn’t. Create a formal content plan based on delivering more of what is working, and less of what doesn’t. Keep analyzing your results and be prepared to adjust your plan if necessary.
Work to divert people to your own assets
Even if you’re a small business, view social media as a starting point rather than an endpoint. In particular, work hard on search engine optimization and email marketing. Quite simply, your aim is to develop your relationship with your social media followers so that they simply become brand followers.
The way to do this is to ensure that there is plenty of unique, valuable content on your own website (e.g. in-depth blog posts). Actively promote this content on your social media profiles and elsewhere. For example, do your best to optimize it for search engines so it gets a high ranking in search results.
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