Why you need a marketing strategy and how it can help you
It’s time to stop posting without an effective marketing strategy, because that’s the equivalent of driving to a new place without a sat nav. You’ll get lost and it’s completely ineffective. By wasting your time and not investing time into a marketing strategy, you’ll just be creating content for the sake of it, which will get your business nowhere.
Instead you need to think about:
Who you want to be working with
Their "pain points"
How you can help them
What content they want to see
Your goals for your content
How you'll measure the success of your content
What you want the end result to be
Then you can start creating content. Because your marketing strategy informs you of:
Who you want to work with
Think client demographics, they type of things they do in their spare time, how much money they have to invest in your business. You’ll also know what their “pain-points” or problems are, and how your brand solves this for them, as well as the types of content they engage with, find valuable and want to see. By knowing all of this, you’re then able to figure out what you need to be talking about, the language you need to use, the content format you need to be creating, and where you need to be posting it.
Your content pillars
These inform you of the core topics you need to be talking about online, in order for your ideal customer to know what it is you sell, and everything about your brand. They inform you of how you need to show up to get them to trust and like you, and it’s doing this that will help drive sales. Having a list of 3-5 content pillars is also fantastic for saving time when creating content, because you know exactly what it is you need to be talking about.
Of course, having these pillars doesn’t mean your content points are limited. You can talk about a whole array of topics that come under those pillars, as long as they are relevant to you and your business!
What your competitors are doing, and what you can do to stand out
Whilst I’m not an advocate for constantly looking at everything your competitors do online, it is useful to know, and have done some research. Because that way you know where the gaps in the market are, as well as what they’re doing, that you could be doing differently. Comparison is the thief of joy, so don’t do this all the time, but a competitor analysis can be really useful in allowing you to see a) what is working within their marketing and b) what you don’t want to be doing/including within your marketing strategy.
Which platforms you need to be creating content for
By knowing your ideal customer, you know where you should focus your marketing efforts. If you want to be working with other business owners, founders or CEOs, then LinkedIn would be the place to be. If you’re a creative, you might want to focus on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest that are much more visual platforms. If you’re looking to grow a large community then Facebook may be a solution. Look at where your ideal customer spends most of their time, and focus your efforts there.
Your goals for your marketing strategy
What do you want your marketing strategy to be achieving? Is it more reach and brand awareness? Maybe it’s more sales? Or a combination of the two? Whatever the case may be, knowing what your end goal is, is so important in knowing what content you need to be creating within your marketing strategy.
Knowing what these goals are, means that it’ll also be much easier to track the success of your marketing strategy, and you’ll know which Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) to focus on. If you’re looking for increased brand awareness, you may look at reach, % of that reach that is new people, and follower growth. For community building goals, you may look at the number of DMs you get and the number of comments and shares on posts you get. For sales goals, you’ll want to look at website traffic, the number of sales enquiries you get and the number of sales you make. You get the idea.
Knowing what the goals for your marketing strategy are will also allow you to reverse engineer those results. What do you need to do to get there? Break it down step by step and then start working towards this.
You know how your digital marketing ties in with your overall business goals
This is pretty self-explanatory, but you should ideally be using your business goals, to inform your marketing strategy. And by knowing both your business goals, and marketing goals you know exactly what steps you need to take to achieve your version of success.
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That right there is why you need a marketing strategy. Believe me when I say it’ll be worth it, the results might only trickle in slowly to begin with (as whilst you have a strategy, you’ll still need to experiment with content to help you figure out what works for you), it’ll be so worth it in the end, and you’ll achieve far more than what you’ve been doing previously.
And if you need help, I have availability for marketing audits and digital marketing strategy days where you work with me to create a marketing strategy that actually works for your business.
