There is so much advice out there, so many strategies, and so many tools to get a brand out there to your potential customers, be they individual consumers or established businesses. A major trap is to follow the trends that other companies are doing without seeing if it works well for your business first.
How can you tell if a strategy is a good fit or not? Here are three factors to consider for success.
It Depends on Who You Are
Your brand is unique. It has a unique set of customer targets, and it should have a unique voice that shines through with every piece of content your company produces. If your voice is bland, or, worse, a direct copy of another company’s voice, you won’t stand out as memorable in the subconscious of potential clients and customers. There must be definite quantitative and qualitative differences between your company and everyone else. Those differences can help you sculpt or choose a strategy that will be best for you.
It Depends on What You Have
Different marketing tools and strategies require different levels of time, money, and expertise. If you try to spread your marketing efforts too thin, across too many platforms, in too many languages or countries, and/or catered toward too many demographic groups at once, you will realize that not enough budget was invested in any one area to make much of a difference. And that can severely damage your overall ROI. Instead, it may be wiser to develop a marketing strategy that can be handled by the manpower you already have, and plan to grow at a steady, manageable rate over the course of the next few quarters.
It Depends on What You Sell
What you sell, and you who are selling to, will greatly affect your marketing strategy. A B2B purchase is often driven by logic. The buyer is looking for something to improve the number of his or her business. Statistics, numbers, and hard facts will move a sale to a business faster than fluff. Individual consumers, on the other hand, are often the opposite. They will buy a product because they feel it will satisfy a need they have in their lives. The decision is more fueled by emotion and not logic.
So the strategy you adopt will be very different depending on who you plan to sell to. Copying a campaign from a B2B company if you are selling to consumers would be a major mistake, but it is a mistake that does happen because a new business owner just looks at the success of a strategy without considering the parameters.
And that is a major takeaway from these three points. Your marketing strategy needs to be backed up by business data. Let your company data call the tune for the strategy decision. When you take into consideration your brand’s unique voice and marketing goals, your company’s resources, as well as your offers and intended customers, you’ll be able to use both internal and external data to create a custom marketing strategy that will meet your goals, improve overall ROI, and boost profits for years to come.