How to Develop a Successful Marketing Strategy

Oct 15, 2019 How to Develop a Successful Marketing Strategy

The first step in developing a successful marketing strategy is to validate that you have a very solid business strategy.

Business Strategy

A business strategy defines how a company is going to create and deliver a valuable product or service to the marketplace.  It is based on providing the product(s) or services that you identified as a need not being met in the marketplace for what you do.  Getting the right combination of price, quality and service is critical.  Your product or service must be differentiated in some key way from the competition.

Marketing Strategy

Now you are ready to develop your marketing strategy which is a document that describes your customer characteristics, personas and segments.

Customer Characteristics

The marketing strategy itself starts with identifying the characteristics of your ideal customer.  This is done in terms of demographic (e.g. age, location, incomes, specific needs) and psychographic characteristics (e.g. subconscious or conscious beliefs, motivations, and priorities).  These taken together are used to try to identify the customer and explain and predict consumer behavior.

Marketing Personas

The next step is to create a set of marketing personas that represent the different user types within the ideal customer set (targeted demographic) that are expected to use the product in a similar way (one type of persona).

Customer Segmentation

Typically, you will find that there is more than one profile and persona combination for your customers.  So you want to break down your target customers into addressable segments.  By addressable, I mean that you have ways of finding and reaching those customers defined by the profile and persona.  This segmentation is then used to develop specific messaging and to deliver that messaging through specific marketing channels.

Marketing Plan

The marketing plan takes these addressable segments, develops the messaging, identifies the channels and combines them with specific actions to take such as running ads in social media, or advertising in a magazine that specifically addresses the target audience (Road and Track or Backpacker for example) etc.

For more information, click on https://apollogr.com/develop-a-marketing-strategy/.

 

Bryan B Mason

Apollo Consulting Group, Newport, RI