The year is coming to an end and many entrepreneurs and business leaders are feeling pressure from underperforming marketing tactics in 2020 to rethink their marketing strategy.

You can do ‘what you’ve always done’ or you can adapt to a changing environment and build a ‘smart’ marketing strategy that is relevant to today’s economic situation, buyer behaviour and tools.

The latter is, of course, the only real solution to using marketing as a way to generate leads, increase brand awareness and fast-track your business growth. First things first:

What steps does your Business need to take to Build a Marketing Strategy?

Rethink your 2021 business goals. Things have changed and your business needs to change with it. If you are an entrepreneur, a great guide to building out a business plan and setting goals in the entrepreneurs’ bible, The Rockfeller Habits.

Remember that “Goals without routines are wishes; routines without goals are aimless.” With that in mind, set out your business and marketing goals clearly, then work out how you are going to make them happen.

Ensuring that you are disciplined in the execution of your business plan and marketing strategy is critical, but it does lead to success. The Rockfeller Habits are based on 70,000 companies that scaled up while reducing the time the entrepreneur spent running the business.

In the Rockfeller Habits book there is a clear path to success and it requires good leadership, a clear vision and practiced behaviour.

• Ensure that your management team is healthy and aligned.
• Set goals on what needs to be accomplished each quarter to achieve the year-ends goal.
• Align management discussions and communication with the need to ensure that not only management is clear on the vision, but the people that make it happen are clear too.
• Use project management tools like ASANA to ensure that every facet of the organisation has a person assigned with accountability for ensuring that goals are met.
• Collaborate with your team and ensure that employee input is welcome and considered to identify obstacles and any opportunities as they arise.
• Collate customer feedback and analyse across data points, financial data and surveys.
• Bring your core values alive and ensure that everyone on the team understands the purpose of your company.
• Continually provide platforms for employees to articulate the key components of the company’s strategy, to ensure that the message has not become diluted and off-track.
• Bring company culture to the forefront and ensure that employees are ‘heard and seen’ and that you know whether someone has had a good day or not.
• Make the businesses plans and performance transparent and visible to everyone.

Set Marketing Goals as art of your Marketing Strategy

When you set marketing goals within your marketing strategy, you are providing a key point of reference as to what the tactics you deploy are working towards.

Ensure that your marketing goals are specific, measurable, realistic with set time frames on delivering upon the goal.

According to CoSchedule research: “Marketers who set goals are 376% more likely to report success than those who don’t. And 70% of those successful, goal-setting marketers achieve them.”

Research the Market

Market research can be conducted in many ways, but the easiest and fastest way is to use a platform like Robotic Marketer which helps with the entire marketing strategy, as well as ensuring that you have in-depth data on the market and how best to shape your marketing strategy with that in mind.

What does market research tell you?

• How the economy is affecting buyer behaviour?
• What your competitors are doing from a marketing perspective and what market share they hold?
• What buyers want and how they want to see, hear, feel it.
• What makes your customer buy a product or service?
• What is trending in your industry?
• What challenges your industry are facing?
• Who are the key stakeholders in your industry?
• What influences purchases?

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT)

While this is self-explanatory, many entrepreneurs and business leaders leave this in their heads, and never write it down.

The advantage of writing it down in a marketing strategy is the ability to constantly review your SWOT and see how you are tracking. It also helps remind you of the opportunities in front of you so that you don’t take your eye off the ball.

Identify Customer Profiles

Build out your customer profiles but do not rely on your gut instinct or what your customer profile was 10 years ago.

Right now, is a good opportunity to investigate who your customers are and what is the best market opportunity for your business.

Areas to consider when building a customer profile:

• Name of customer profile
• Why this profile would buy from your business
• What is the age of the buyer, lifestyle, income, interests
• Location of buyer
• Buyer patterns
• Purchasing preferences

Conduct a Competitor Analysis

This is very important if you are serious about growing your business and taking market share from your competitors.

Use platforms like:

• Alexa
• SEM Rush
• Mozo
• Sprout Social
• Phlanx
• Social Blade
• Ahrefs
• Buzzsumo
• Similarweb

Develop Marketing Strategies To Support Business and Marketing Goals

This is the fun part. Your analysis of the market, customers and competitors should drive what tactics you use. Implement the 7P’s of marketing strategies:

• Products/Services: Use tactics for SEO, blogging, social media, website, email and lead generation.
• Price: Ascertain the price point of your products and/or services, how big your database needs to be to achieve the sales goals that you have set out for your business etc.
• Place: Where you are marketing.
• Promotion: How are you promoting your product or service. Examples like events, webinars, SEO, PPC etc.
• Physical Evidence: How your branding is working across all communications touch points. Is it consistent?
• Processes: What does your sales model look like? How does your marketing structure work? What processes do you have in place to make sure that your marketing department works like a well-oiled machine? What technologies do you use for project management?
• People: What people do you need to accelerate your marketing programs?
• Partners: What partnerships and alliances do you have in place to sell more products and services?

Having a powerful marketing strategy is one thing, but executing it is another. The discipline you and your team show will determine whether or not your marketing strategy is successful. 

Testing ideas and campaigns is imperative to finding campaigns that have a higher chance of success.

We use Robotic Marketer to develop marketing strategies not only for our company, but for our clients. It is an easy to use tool, or if you prefer, you can have marketing manager from Robotic Marketer facilitate your marketing workshop with your team.

It’s more important than ever to ensure that you allocate budget and resources to marketing, especially with the way in which business has changed in the past 12 months and how economies recover.

If you need any help, don’t be afraid to contact us.

On January 7 this year, I opened by diary for the first time in 2020. It was a remarkable moment, one that was so full of promise. Like any entrepreneur on the rise (or at least I thought that was to be the case), I had written down the goals I had set out for the year ahead in my diary in December. 

For most search engines, backlinks are the ultimate ranking factor. Traffic to your site is directly related to the quality of the backlinks your website has. Ultimately the greater number of authoritative websites that link to you, the better rankings and traffic you’ll get. It’s always important to remember the power of Google rankings. When you surf the web, Google analyses your websites backlinks to understand how your pages are connected to one another and in what way.

Whether you are a start-up that didn't get off the ground due to COVID, a small business, or a large corporation, you are faced with uncertain times and a very volatile marketplace which means that your online performance and in particular your digital marketing strategy may not be working quite as effectively as it should.