Choosing the right marketing strategy for your business is an incredibly important decision that a business must make. It will decide the success or failure of your marketing efforts and ultimately have a major impact on the bottom line of your business. An expert marketing strategist, such as an outsourced CMO, can help in deciding this. For now, we will focus on the concepts.
When deciding which marketing strategy to go for there are several things you must take into consideration. Some of these are: who your ideal customer is, what your competition is doing and what your offer is. This is not an exhaustive list of everything you must know in order to have a successful marketing campaign but not knowing these things will most likely lead to an unsuccessful marketing campaign.
1. Your ideal Customer
What do comedians, authors, entrepreneurs, and politicians have in common? When communicating with people, one thing they are constantly reminded of is to know their audience. Not knowing this can make you appear tone-deaf, selling the wrong thing, or landing yourself in hot water.
If you are unclear about who your ideal customer is, then you need to spend some serious thinking time resolving this. You must know this in order to make sure that your ads don’t land on deaf ears. There is lots of content and teachings on how you can learn this. A simple way to start is to think: who? What? Why? When? And how? Think about their motivations and fears. Also, remember that it is important to not just come up with one avatar. Most businesses will have a few of these avatars that all fall into their brand’s messaging.
You can use the 80/20 rule to help you crystalize who your ideal customer is. The 80/20 rule states that 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. Therefore, it is of great importance to know this 20% inside and out. If you can make this 20% of your customers 100% of your customers, then that 80% of revenue will become 400% revenue. That is a quadrupling of your business’s revenue, hypothetically, stemming from simply just knowing your best customers extremely well and replicating them when searching for new customers. This is something that an outsourced CMO does all the time when onboarding a new client. It is part of the foundations of a successful relationship.
Obviously, in real life, this is harder than the sum above. But the principle is still true. If you can apply this principle correctly, then you should be able to see results.
2. What is your Competition is Doing?
This may be seen as a bit of a marketer’s hack but will always be effective. If you are unsure of what to do, you can look at what a successful competitor is doing well and imitate it to some degree. There are problems with this but there are many advantages too.
One problem with this method is that you are always behind. If you are copying and not inventing you will never be the trailblazing business that offers something new and exciting to a potential customer. If you are a business that does something innovative and fresh then you have a first-mover advantage. This is why so many tech companies often have hundreds of millions of dollars in burn rates and years upon years before they are profitable. It is because they have that first-to-market advantage and need to ensure they keep that and get as many customers as possible to reach viability. You can look at what Facebook is doing and copy it but just because they have had success does not mean you will. In fact, I guarantee that you will not have the same success as them. This proves that this method is not always the best.
Where this method is effective is with cookie-cutter businesses. If you own a single car mechanics business, then you can look at what chains that have ten locations are doing and copy, to a degree, what they are doing. This could be a method they use to attract customers or promotions they use to retain customers, etc. This is fine and will work.
These two examples show how you have to use your own reason and judgment when looking at what your competitors are doing. What can you feasibly take inspiration on and what would be something that you are recklessly trying to imitate. It’s like trying to reinvent the wheel but using the wrong materials, like soil.
3. Your Offer
In marketing, we often use a lot of time and energy thinking about the intricacies of marketing tactics, especially regarding paid advertising like PPC or Facebook advertising. Often we can actually get overly bogged down in this way of thinking and miss the simple answer to have more success in your marketing: your offer.
The easiest way to have a successful marketing campaign is to have an irresistible offer. That’s it. It’s that simple. A great offer marketed poorly will still do better than a poor offer marketed well. So, you as a marketer should make your job easy by making sure that you have a fantastic offer, therefore you do not need to have a perfect marketing campaign where if one metric is off you will not see a return.
In order to make sure that you craft an excellent offer for your prospects, there are a few simple questions that you can answer. These are:
How are you different? What is your competitive advantage?
Answer these questions from your point of view and then also from the customer’s point of view. This is just a starting point but an effective one nonetheless.
Using the three concepts I have laid out in this article will not give you the perfect marketing strategy for your business, but using them will send you in the right direction. If you feel that your business requires advice from a marketing strategy expert, then an outsourced CMO can provide your business with strategic clarity, and can ensure the tricky decision of which marketing strategy is right for your business is correctly made.