If you want to generate new business, your marketing strategy needs to be up to date. Marketing strategies can be short, aimed at bringing in revenue in the moment – such as email blasts and promotions; or they can be long-term, used to build a brand or foster brand loyalty.
Consumer trends are always changing, so you should keep your marketing strategy under review and make changes when necessary. Here are three tips to help you do it.
1. Review Your Goals
The selecting recommendations will compel your marketing strategy update to include a review of your marketing objectives. This because you cannot fully update your marketing tactics without first referring them to the overarching targets and dictates of your marketing goals, especially because priorities and preferences will undoubtedly have changed. Also, this may reveal to you the newly developed marketing techniques and tools that could fit better with your business marketing interests, help with branding development, more targeted marketing, and other pertinent possibilities.
A good marketing plan is also built on SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) that help to direct your efforts, and these clearly link to your business’s overall aims. But the process will also help you to sense and seize new opportunities as they break and capitalise on your chances for growth.
It is also advisable to review your marketing objectives frequently even if you are not about to make major changes. The marketing world is changing fast and, if your marketing strategy is not regularly updated to keep pace, it will quickly start lagging behind.
Remember to think through your own goal when reviewing the change: will it affect other key stakeholders? For example, if my goal is ‘increase brand awareness’, should I give notice to my employees, my customers, and any partners or regulators who might be impacted by this change?
2. Evaluate Your Competitors
After you have analysed your customers and the market, the next logical step in updating your marketing strategy is to assess your competitors. This will help you come up with new concepts that you want to incorporate into the mix and also teach you about the types of strategies your competitors have been using that don’t work as well for them.
Two types of competition are direct and indirect. Direct competitors offer the same product or service you do. They’re gunning for your customers directly – situation#1. Indirect competitors, in contrast, are in the same broad category as you, indeed selling different products or services, but they are still trying to get at your customers – situation #2. The gym is a directly competitive industry to a home-workout equipment company, but both are indirectly competitive to someone selling nutritious snacks.
While you have this list of competitors, do an audit of their online presence and plan. That includes their website, social media pages, SEO, and other digital media. You might want to start at the top of the list with their most-shared posts on social media, or test the depth of this analysis by looking at the SEO keywords they use/have used, or by simply looking to see who has written about them most recently through a simple Google news search. With Sprout Social, this can become a fairly easy and fast process.
Whether direct or indirect, closely examine your competitors’ marketing methods and take as many notes as possible about both the channels they use and their messages. Then create an improved and more impactful marketing effort for your business.
3. Evaluate Your Audience
It is crucial to frequently review your audience, especially if you have more than one and they are highly segmented. Because each demographic will have needs that will dictate what your messaging will look like. For instance, if you have an audience of sports enthusiasts, and you frequently change your advertising campaign, you might want to try looking into tailoring the campaign towards the season or include an offer for new equipment.
‘The more you know about your readers, the better you can speak to them.’ (So the rule goes anyway.) Google Analytics will share statistical data about your site visitors; how old they are, what gender, what are their ‘interests’ (according to Google), and so on. If your business has the resources and appetite, you can collect data about your customers through questionnaires too.
Based on this information, you can update your marketing strategy, like if your audience has become more eco-friendly, it could be a sign that you’ll also have to change the products you offer. This way, you’ll differentiate yourself from competitors and gain more consumers. Plus, thanks to that, you could become more effective in personalising your messages, which is important to 76 per cent of consumers. You can start today by using Semrush’s buyer persona templates. These fictional, but data-driven profiles of your ideal customers will save you a lot of headaches.