Without Strategy, There Is No Paradise

T e all know how important it is to build a solid business plan. And yet surprisingly many of us are not putting the same effort when it comes to building a solid digital marketing strategy, what good is investing so much time and money to create and build a new business, only to have no customers?

If you want to have customers, you will have to actively go out and find them, and then let them know that your business exists. The only way to do this is with a solid marketing strategy .46% of brands still do not have a defined digital marketing strategy, and 16% do have a strategy but have not yet put it into practice. That means more than half of businesses aren't getting the exposure and customers they might have, simply because people don't even know they exist. When you don't have a marketing strategy, you run the risk of having no direction as a company, wasting money on channels that aren't working for you, and losing potential customers to your competitors. Fortunately, creating your own marketing strategy is not that difficult.

These are the four steps you need to create a marketing plan that works for your business:

Know your target customer: The first step in building your marketing strategy is knowing who you are going to sell your products or services to. Doing this ensures that marketing efforts are focused, and as a result, you will get the return on investment that you seek. A common way to do this is to create a buyer persona buyer image. By creating a buyer image, you can be sure that you are promoting your products and services to people who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. Otherwise, your marketing strategy is roughly the equivalent of a man in a box yelling through a megaphone at random people on the street. The objective is to focus your efforts on finding that semi-fictitious or ideal buyer, who will acquire your products or services. Understanding what you are looking for, what you need, what hurts, in order to provide effective solutions through your services, is the key to segmenting your target audience and improving your marketing actions.

Think about how you would like your ideal client to be. It's recommended to create a list of important questions to ask yourself about your target customer when outlining a buyer:

Location: Where do they live? Where do they not live?

Age: What is the age range?

Gender

Interests: What are your interests?

Education level

Work: In what fields of work do your clients work and what positions do they hold?

Income level: What is your income range?

Civil status

Language:

Purchase motivation: What are their reasons for buying your product?

Buying Concerns: What are your concerns when purchasing your product?

Pain or pain point: what hurts? how are you going to solve your problem?

These and other questions will be the starting point to create an image of an ideal client and to be able to develop your digital marketing strategy according to this data.

Investigate the competition: Almost assuredly, there is no market without competition and in case you develop an innovation that does not exist in the market yet, I assure you that the competition will come faster than you think. If you enter a competitive market, find out what works for them and do it better, or look for untapped opportunities.

Some strategies to investigate the competition could be:

Check the social networks of the competition. How many followers they have, what content they publish, how they interact with their audience, how they respond to inquiries and complaints, among other factors. An interesting tool to see the mentions that people make about a company, in Mention

Subscribe to the newsletters of the competition, to see what content they are sending to their customers through their email marketing campaigns

Choose your distribution channels: In Digital Marketing, if the content is King, the information distribution channel is queen. There are a wide variety of ways to get your marketing message across to your customers. From traditional advertising and paying for ads to generating content marketing or mailings campaigns, these are some of the channels that are being used to distribute content.

To get the ROI you want from your marketing strategy, it's important to make informed and deliberate decisions about which channels provide the best ways to reach your target customers. Finding the right marketing channel for you can take time and trial and error, so don't worry if you can't get it right the first time.

Analyze your sales funnel: The sales funnel follows the AIDA format of Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action.

sales funnel

At the higher end, you have people who are completely unaware of your brand and you want to figure out how to get their attention and interest. Once you do, you will need to find a way to convert them into leads by creating a sense of desire. And lastly, you'll capitalize on that desire by asking them to take a specific action, whether it's subscribing to their email list or buying a product. What you want to do is break down each channel that you have chosen to focus on in your marketing strategy and chart your customer journey through your sales funnel.

As you will see, these strategies are pillars to be able to develop a sustainable business in an increasingly globalized world.

Knowing your ideal client, the environment, and the market that surrounds you, and the distribution channels of your strategy will give you a significant advantage to be able to succeed in your comprehensive business strategy.