As we make our way into the year. Many businesses and Marketers will be looking to refine and update their processes in order to tap into the latest trends and tools to ensure that they are maximising their online marketing efforts.
Creating a marketing strategy is essential to nurture your customers, improve your business and increasing ROI (return on investment) effectively and efficiently. A marketing strategy is especially important if you want your business to leverage the highest ROI trends for 2023, short video, influencer marketing and branded social media. This means to get the best results for your business or brand you must carefully work both emerging trends and proven strategies into your plan.
Establishing a defined goal is key to an effective strategy in 2023…and it doesn’t have to be stressful either.
Defining your business/brand ‘Why’ or ‘Purpose’!
Now, this may seem cliché or obvious, but it’s important to understand why your business/brand exists, what purpose it aims to facilitate and how it makes your customers’ lives better.
From there you can work on your brand strategy around that core goal, ensuring that everything has a purpose, and you’re not just sharing random memes or quotes in hopes of hooking a few random customers. Not to say that method does not work but building a deliberate focused strategy means that every update becomes another brick in the foundation for your brand.
For example, these are some core purpose statements from some of the world’s biggest brands (from Collins and Porras’ ‘Building Your Company’s Vision’) report:
It’s important to note that this purpose points statements are the result of honing on why each business exists, not why they sell.
Setting up your Marketing Objectives
Marketing objectives are actionable targets designed to provide not just overall direction, but clear and specific actions. It is specific measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based.
Marketing objectives should be tied to the overall success of the company and not just an unpredictable number.
With every objective, you should aim to be as specific as possible. For example, this could be to increase the business’s sales: if you sell products or services, you might want to focus on increasing sales to increase revenue. Your objective might be to “increase sales by 15% in the next 6 months, by increasing sign-up by 10% and increasing average customer orders by 20%”.
Competitive Analysis
Knowing your competition is crucial in creating a marketing strategy. If you aren’t looking at your competitors, you won’t know how you are differentiating yourself enough from the competition and effectively drawing the attention of your intended audience. Now, this does not mean “copying” your competition it just means overlooking what they are doing and differentiating yourself in a way that makes you different to existing and potential customers.
By sitting down and really identifying your competitor you might end up uncovering a surprise competitor who is vying your target market’s attention and engagement.
Content Creation
Once you have your business/brand purpose, objectives, and your competitive analysis, it is time to take the most critical and exciting step: Creating your marketing content. It is important to undertake this effort strategically. That means not posting random content that doesn’t align with your brand or your purpose, this can give potential customers the wrong idea, or market the wrong people. You must aim to capitalise on emerging trends whilst also staying true to your business values.
The competition is crazy out there especially with Instagram, Facebook and Tik Tok these days. It’s important to invest in trends and social platforms that have a high ROI for your business, such as short video (Tik Tok and Instagram Reels), influencer marketing, and paid ads (whether that be on socials or google).
Planning A Marketing Budget
Henry Ford once said, ‘”The man who stops advertising to save money, is like the man who stops a clock to save time.”
Your ideal client may be taking a lunch break or a walk, merely scrolling through their social media feeds waiting to be enticed with your offer to meet what they have been looking for. Without advertising and marketing how are you meant to get your brand and service out into the market?
The businesses that survived the pandemic weren’t the ones that cut back. They were the ones that pushed through and appealed to the market by creating timely and meaningful content in moments when consumers were craving it. And this hunger has only gotten bigger. Therefore, now is the time to cut through.
The one thing to know is digital marketing costs are rising. This is simply due to the fact that there is more competition across paid digital channels in order to maximise performance to meet marketing goals.
Achieving this type of growth depending on organic channels is extremely difficult, therefore, unfortunately, you need to pay to play. You can bet that your competitor is considerate of the market there in and looking to acquire a greater market share through stronger digital promotional efforts.
When thinking about a marketing budget always consider your financial capabilities and marketing goals. Understanding the market and category you play in will help determine the budgets needed to grow your business.
Ultimately creating a complete marketing Strategy is not something that can happen overnight. It takes time, hard work and dedication to ensure you are reaching your ideal audience.
Let’s have a chat to explore how Wise Up Marketing can help you grow your business
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