Marketing Strategy: The Starting Point for Any Business
Marketing is the lifeblood of a business. Without it, you are not able to generate revenue and can’t grow your customer base. Developing a marketing strategy for your business should be the starting point when you want to grow your company. Because if people don’t know about your product or service, they won’t buy it — no matter how great it might be.
On the other hand, many startups make the mistake of rushing into marketing without first considering their overall strategy for how they will execute their marketing efforts in a way that generates results. This blog post will help you avoid this common mistake by outlining how to create an effective marketing strategy so that whatever you do, is helping you reach your business goals!
1. What is the marketing strategy
2.Why is marketing strategy important?
3. The four Ps of marketing — Product, Price, Place, Promotion
4. Understanding your target market and how to reach them with the right message in the right place at the right price
5. Marketing strategy vs. marketing plan
What is the marketing strategy?
Before setting up your Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter account, ask yourself, who is your target audience? Where do they hang out? What information they are looking for? What problems are they facing? How are you different from your competitors?
Marketing strategy is an overarching blueprint that clearly explains your brand proposition, your pricing strategy, your product offerings, and where you are going to sell your product and services. All your marketing activities will carry a coherent brand proposition and competitive advantages to your target audience.
Why is marketing strategy important?
In startups, we always talk about business models. A solid business model is a foundation for further growth. The same goes for your growth activities. Having a marketing strategy is like having a business model for growth. You know where your potential customers are, how to reach out to them, what ‘languages’ you should speak to them, what are their needs, how your solutions can help them solve a problem, and what is the most effective way to convert them into customers.
According to a CoSchedule survey, companies with a documented marketing strategy are 313% more likely to report success.
Marketing strategy is your foundation for all marketing activities and it is a key element for success. The four Ps of marketing — Product, Price, Place, Promotion
The classic marketing mix has 4Ps, but some companies expanded it to 6Ps or 7Ps. The basic marketing mix consists of:
- Product: what products and services are you selling
- Price: what does it cost
- Place: where can you potential customers buy it
- Promotion: how are you going to promote your products or services to generate incremental sales or acquire new customers
First, you need to define what products and services are you selling. Price, Place & Promotion will be determined by the product or service that is being sold to your customers; for example, if a company sells coffee beans they would need Product (coffee), Prices ($/lb.), Places where it can sell its goods(local grocery stores) as well Promotions such promotion on social media sites like Facebook advertising with an offer of free shipping when people buy more than $25 worth at one time). If someone were looking into purchasing this type of business then these four Ps could help them decide whether their investment in acquiring said entity was worthwhile because all aspects have been considered beforehand.
Is your price competitive? Is it too high or too low? If your price is too high, no one will buy from you, if your price is too low, you are losing sales. If there’s one thing we learned about entrepreneurs over time: they’re not always right! This applies especially when developing their own product pricing model without considering market research data available online. You need to study your competitors, your target audience, and even the alternative solutions to get the pricing right.
If you have a B2B tech startup offering project-based services, your best place to sell your product might not be on Amazon or even your online store. If you are a SaaS company, you will sell your product most likely on your website. If you are selling physical products such as cheese or paintings, selling in-store will limit your reach. Look at how businesses suffered during the pandemic. Those who thrived are the online businesses or moved their business online.
Traditionally big brands can afford to spend millions in promotion, as a startup, investments are limited. Therefore it is important to have an effective content creation plan and distribution channels that will help achieve success in the long-term such as SEO or social media campaigns for instance (rather than just short term). You need customer acquisition strategies like lead- generation which can include paid advertising on Facebook Ads if necessary but also free methods of generating leads from blog posts etc.
Most startups jump into the promotion activities with social media, Instagram, and so on. If you look at the marketing strategy, you will question yourself, is Facebook is the best channel to reach your customer? Is Instagram is the best channel to present your services to your target customer and carry out your brand proposition? Maybe not, it depends on your business and who are your target audience.
Understand your target market
This is one of the most important steps in your marketing strategy. You need to know who are you targeting and what do they want from a company like yours? The better understanding, more targeted will be all other activities that follow such as content creation or advertising campaigns, etc. because it’s very difficult for example if someone wants an online store with clothes but also likes cycling so much he spends hours on his bike every day — how can I target him through Facebook ads without knowing this information up front (I would never show my ad about clothing)? So make sure before executing any activity under the “marketing” umbrella, ask yourself: does our product/service match their needs at least partially enough?” And then think strategically about which channel should you use based on the potential customer’s behavior.
One of the common mistakes startups make is, when being asked, who are your target customers? They said we can sell to everyone. If you target everyone, then you have to spend resources on a wide range of channels, you need to create a wide range of communication assets, you can not pinpoint the exact pain by a certain group. This is not targeted, this is inefficient.
On the other hand, startups should be laser-focused on who are their primary target customers. By understanding what is their pain point, where they are looking for information, what is their shopping journey, you can target them on each touchpoint.
A customer persona is a good tool to help you visually describe what a typical customer looks like. In all your marketing activities, you should always think about how to convince this person to buy from you. This person, not everyone else!
Besides, you need to understand what is their pain point? Where are they looking for information, how their shopping journey look like. If we understand the answer to these questions and focus on them at each touchpoint then marketing will be more efficient!
Marketing strategy vs. marketing plan
Many people are confused about marketing strategy and marketing plan. Often times when people are talking about marketing strategy, they are actually talking about a marketing plan. A marketing plan is a more concrete plan that lays out all marketing activities. It can include your social media plan, content plan, emailing, etc. It contains a day to day marketing activities that you should do, in line with marketing strategy.
In a nutshell, marketing strategy is an overarching strategy to define the four 4Ps. A marketing plan is an action plan to achieve marketing objectives using the 4Ps.
Conclusion
Many startups have a rough idea of the marketing strategy elements, but they are not sharp enough. Therefore in the marketing activities, it is not optimal. Think it like when you aim at a target, you know the target is somewhere in the south direction, but you don’t know exactly where. By having a marketing strategy, you pinpoint where you think the target is by studying the environment, the trace, and gathered other information. Then you can prepare your bow and shoot. Isn’t it more efficient? That is why every startup should have a documented marketing strategy before they spend tons of money on marketing activities.
We are Promote and Scale, an agency specialized in digital marketing and lead generation for early-stage start-ups.
It is our mission to help you stop wasting your time and money on ineffective and inconsistent marketing activities. It is our vision to offer you comprehensive, high-quality, and efficient marketing services, so you can focus on what really matters — building your product, business development, and acquiring new customers.
