5 must-have marketing strategies to run a business successfully

As an entrepreneur, after ideation should have clear marketing strategies to run the business successfully. It’s a critical element that would define the success of the business in the foreseeable future.

With an effective marketing strategy in place, you get to easily flesh out critical business aspects such as creating customer avatars, plan on how to acquire more customers, spot new growth opportunities, and map out areas that you need to spend marketing dollars in the future.

Unfortunately, developing marketing strategies to run the business successfully as well that resonates with your target audience is a time- consuming and capital-intensive affair. This is why businesses, especially those in the technology industry need to think strategically in order to boost their visibility, increase sales, and sustain profits.

For instance, Ukraine programmers looking to market their services can tailor their marketing strategy around the low development costs and specialized IT skills available in the country. 

With that said, however, the marketing world is a dynamic ecosystem. The trends, technologies, and tactics keep changing. As such, it is important that your business stays ahead of the curve by keeping tabs with these new developments or risk falling behind competitors.

In this article, we are going to look at the importance of having marketing strategies to run the business successfully with a multitude of approach.

But before we look at that –

What is a marketing strategy?

Basically, a marketing strategy is a game plan that helps a business reach its prospective customers and turn them into actual customers. It contains many different elements including the company’s value proposition, brand messaging, customer demographics data, and many other high-level elements.

In order to run a successful marketing campaign, businesses need to understand how their customers interact with different touchpoints of the business both in the online and offline channels. This way, it becomes easier to tailor the marketing message to meet the customer’s needs.

Unfortunately, with most customers opting to shop online, most businesses are faced with a Catch-22. The need to increase visibility, without running their wells dry. It shouldn’t then come as a surprise that up to 70% of marketers are actively leveraging different marketing strategies to cater to different audience segments.

Different Types of Marketing Strategies to run a business successfully

A combination of modern and traditional marketing techniques can help you create an effective marketing strategy. From electronic marketing to print materials, you should always choose the right one depending on your target audience and product/service specification.

Below, we have listed four marketing strategies that can help propel your business.

Branding

Branding is one of the most effective marketing strategies that a business can implement. The brand message is pegged on the promises made by a company to its customers. As an entrepreneur, it’s important to highlight your unique selling position in the branding message showing what sets you apart from the competitors. For instance, IT companies have over the years continued to quote lower development costs, location, and availability of skills to woo tech companies.

Print Advertising and Marketing Materials

Branding goes together with print advertising and marketing materials. When customers see your business logo and other collateral graphics, they are able to instantly recognize your company even before reading a word. Ads mainly appear in flyers, newspapers, magazines, and online sources. 

Direct Emails

Another great marketing strategy is using direct emails to promote your products or services. According to recent research conducted by Statista, the number of email users is expected to surpass the 4.3 billion mark by 2023. This number is a clear indication that email marketing has plenty of opportunities for businesses looking to push their products or services.

The key to running a successful direct email marketing is knowing the target audience. After all, it would be counterproductive for remote programmers to bombard young mums with emails offering software development services. Before implementing a direct email campaign, you need to profile your customers and compile a targeted list of customers that you need to mail.

Social Networking

Besides setting up a website, you can also use popular social networking sites to market. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat are also invaluable platforms to describe your business, launch new products, offer promotions, and even announce sales. YouTube also works great, especially if your business is offering products that require demonstration.

Top 3 Reasons Why set marketing strategies to run a business successfully fail

There are plenty of reasons as to why most marketing strategies don’t work including;

Lack of a Clear Strategy

The number one reason why most marketing campaigns fail is that they aren’t backed by an iron-clad strategy. Most entrepreneurs simply get caught up in the shiny object syndrome and start engaging in marketing activities without a sense of how well they align with the overall business goals. As a result, all their marketing efforts and resources end up going up the drain.

The absolute fool-proof way to run a successful marketing campaign is to align your business goals with the marketing strategy. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time and money chasing useless tactics that won’t get you results.

Poor Targeting

No matter how good your marketing strategy looks on paper, if it targets the wrong people, then it’s bound to fail. You could be using the right channels, but your marketing message isn’t reaching the right people. 

For instance, when advertising on Facebook, it is incredibly easy to “boost” your posts by paying some advertising dollars. The only problem with such an approach is that it isn’t very targeted. 

Lack of Patience 

We’ve seen how hard insurance marketing salesmen work to convince us to subscribe to their plans. Now, flip the coin and try to convince customers to bring business to you. It takes guts, patience, and some bit of sweat equity.

Sometimes, marketing campaigns fail to work because the business owner gave up too quickly. As a general rule of thumb, it takes anything between six months to 1 year for you to start reaping the benefits of marketing. And although you might see some faint signals of success along the way, it will take a while before your marketing efforts start picking the momentum.

As such, perseverance in marketing is extremely important and you shouldn’t give up one month into the journey.

5 Essential Elements of a Successful Marketing Strategy

Brand Overview

Any effective marketing strategy begins with highlighting the brand’s overview and explaining to your customers what you do, as well as what they should expect whenever they encounter your company.

Market Research

This may seem like a no-brainer suggestion but conducting market research can actually help streamline your marketing strategy. The best starting point to conduct market research is to request feedback from your existing customers. In case you are a startup that doesn’t have to pay customers yet, you can develop your own customer profile and make some educated stabs about their most compelling needs and wants.

Additionally,  you will also need to break down the customer’s avatar using different demographics such as age, gender, location, hobbies, job title, etc. For instance, if you are a software developer, your customers may be looking for programmers for rent. As such, establishing small details such as where they come from, their industry of domain, and their target market not only helps you frame your marketing messaging.but also choose the appropriate strategy.

Pricing and Positioning

Pricing is a key element of positioning. Does your business lean towards the high end or the low end? The sooner you answer this question the easier it becomes to find your position in the market as well as start to understand your competition. 

When you know the bells and whistles of your positioning and competition, constructing an effective marketing strategy and messaging to share with the world becomes a piece of cake.

Tell a Compelling Story

An effective marketing strategy incorporates all the components of an irresistible story including the target audience, their pain points, desired outcomes, the value of your proposition, and the delivery of that value.

Once these different elements are in place, you can proceed to build a central message demonstrating how your solution takes the audiences from their current position to an ideal scenario.

Embrace User-generated Content

According to a survey conducted by TINT,48% of marketing professionals agree the user-generated content helps humanize marketing. With millennials reporting that UGC is 20% more likely to influence their purchase decisions, you can take advantage of this loophole by encouraging your customers to share their personal stories.

Final Thoughts

Marketing is both an art and a science that should be thoughtfully and thoroughly implemented. As an entrepreneur, it is important to know that the foundation upon which your marketing strategy is built on can make or break your business. The key lies in knowing who your customers are and what they want, and only then can you be able to tailor your marketing message to meet them at their point of need.

Once you have the right set of marketing strategies to run a business successfully in place, you need to then draw up a marketing plan that clearly outlines how you intend to implement the strategy and at the same time assess its success. Still, the marketing plan should be constantly reviewed and updated if necessary to allow you to quickly respond and adapt to changes in customer needs and the broader economic climate.

Anastasia

Anastasia Stefanuk is a passionate writer and Information Technology enthusiast. She works as a Content Manager at Mobilunity, a provider of dedicated development teams around the globe. Anastasia keeps abreast of the latest news in all areas of technology, Agile project management, and software product growth hacking, at the same time sharing her experience online to help tech startups and companies to be up-to-date.

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