It’s officially the new year. Resolutions have been made, but is your strategy for marketing ready for the next 12 months of opportunity? Developing a strong strategy for marketing is a powerful way to build a foundation for your business this year.
A quality strategy will help you use the tools at your disposal to reach your goals. It helps keep your marketing efforts on track and gives you a source of guidance and accountability throughout the year.
How To Develop A Strategy For Marketing?
To develop a high-quality marketing strategy, there is only one place to start: setting goals.
Setting Goals For Your Marketing
Your company’s larger goals are an important part of creating useful marketing goals. Your marketing goals should be focused on metrics that make your business operate and grow. For example, if you operate a service-based business, then your goal might be to generate more leads.
This is a good place to start, but for the highest quality goals you should use the SMART framework. Utilizing this framework, your goal becomes:
“By the end of the year, I want to generate 25% more leads through digital marketing channels.”
Once your goals are established, then it is time to better understand your audience and your business.
Understanding Your Audience
When it comes to marketing, your audience should be at the heart of everything you do. This is why it is so important to ensure that you understand your audience as much as possible.
Researching your audience will provide you with more knowledge on how to properly communicate with them. Narrow down a specific group of people that you wish to reach, and this will inform your strategy.
It’s tempting to not want to limit your business and select too broad of a target audience, but it’s important to resist the temptation. The more specific your audience, the better you can communicate effectively with them.
Develop a profile of your potential customer. This should include demographics, preferences, and any other information that may be useful. Your target audience profile will be a useful tool when crafting your marketing messaging.
Once you understand your target audience, then it is time to craft your message.
Crafting Your Messaging
With your target audience profile developed, now it is time to prepare your business’s messaging. This communication aims to reach your audience and communicate effectively about your business.
Think about which aspects of your business are the most appealing to your target audience, these should be the focal points of your marketing.
Your selected target audience should inform nearly all aspects of your marketing message. It should inform not only what you are communicating, but also how you are communicating. Which channels will reach your target most effectively? At what times will communication be most effective? All of these questions should be informed by the research on your target audience.
Record and Analyze Progress
Once your strategy for marketing has been established, you must record relevant data. With digital marketing, there are several ways to record data that can be used to make decisions about your business. This data can be arranged into useful reports to create insights about your audience, business, and industry.
This step is as vital as any other because utilizing your data will inform you about what is working with your marketing and what needs to be adjusted going forward.
This Can Be Your Year With an Informed Strategy
It’s never too late to create a high-quality strategy for your marketing, and January is the perfect time to plan ahead. A strategy for marketing helps focus your marketing on your business goals all year long. Your marketing will thank you in June for the work you do now in January.
If you need help tackling the best way to move forward with your digital marketing goals this year, call on the Fly Pages team. We would love to help you and your business start strong and measure progress monthly, quarterly, and through mid-year analysis.
