When defining your marketing objectives for the year ahead, it’s essential to have a thorough marketing strategy, so you know how best to promote your product or service.
Marketers with a solid strategy in place are 313% more likely to see success than those without one.
However, not all marketing strategies are built equally; and the consequences of a poor marketing strategy can include a loss of profits, a loss of market share and a loss of customer trust.
With this in mind, here are the five things I recommend you should not do when it comes to planning and creating your marketing strategy.
1. Fail to do your research
Canadian entrepreneur and founder of Hootsuite Ryan Holmes famously said: ‘If you form a strategy without research, your brand will barely float and at the speed industries move today, brands sink fast.
Writing a good marketing strategy is not a five-minute task, and it is imperative to do your due diligence before you send your strategy to your manager for final sign-off.
If you don’t do marketing research, then you risk targeting the wrong audiences, using the wrong marketing channels and underestimating the marketing efforts of your competitors. And this could ultimately mean that your product or service fails.
There are many examples of marketing missteps throughout history that could have been avoided by doing thorough marketing research in the initial stages.
For example, genealogical company Ancestry had to pull a television ad which showed a mixed-race couple eloping during the slavery era.
The advert was targeted at people who may have been curious if they had mixed-race ancestry, but many people pointed out on social media that it was potentially problematic and romanticised slavery. This lead to the advert’s removal.
Better research into target audiences and potential reactions may have meant the ultimate goal of the advert could have been adapted into something more positive and less controversial.
So what do you need to consider when doing your market research?
- Who your target audience is (more on this later)
- Who your competitors are and how their product, service and marketing compare to yours
- The unique selling points of your product or service (more on this later too)
- What the current state of the market is and if there are any risks or opportunities on the horizon
A great place to start when doing your research is by carrying out a SWOT analysis. By determining your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, you can work out where you stand and what internal and external factors may help or hinder you.
Alternatively, a PESTLE analysis may give you a reliable indication of the current marketing landscape.
2. Appeal to absolutely everyone
As marketers, we’ve all had some variation of the following conversion with our managers at least once in our career:
‘Okay, I’m currently working on our marketing strategy for the year ahead. Have you done any research already into which customer you want to target?
‘Oh, I think we need to focus on selling to everyone. That way we won’t miss out on any potential sales!’
As tempting as it is to want to appeal to as wide a range of people as possible, this approach can be counterproductive.
By trying to appeal to everyone, you will ultimately appeal to no one at all, as your marketing strategy will be too broad.
Take Tesla as a prime example of a company that knows who to target. It focuses its marketing on affluent people in their thirties and forties – prime users of the web and social media.
The company took the decision to close all of their car showrooms and sell all their cars online instead. Tesla also has a powerful presence on social media, with founder Elon Musk taking the time to answer customer’s questions personally on Twitter.
You can see why the company has 16% of the global market share!
Take the time to work out who your target audience is. Things to consider include:
- How old are they?
- Are they male or female?
- Do they have children or pets?
- What are their hobbies?
- What websites do they visit?
- What type of house do they live in?
- Which social media platforms do they use?
- What problems are they experiencing?
- What do they want to achieve from life?
You can then customise your strategy to target this specific group of people and resolve the pain points that they have.
Remember that you can (and will) still sell your product and service to people who aren’t your target audience, but focusing on your target audience will help you increase the effectiveness of your marketing spend.
3. Focus on vanity metrics
What is a vanity metric? It’s a metric that you measure that ultimately doesn’t tell you anything about your business. All it does is make you feel good.
Take for example, social media followers. You may have over 10,000 followers on Facebook. It’s a stat you take to your manager and they’re delighted that the brand is doing so well.
However, if these 10,000 followers do not engage with your brand or convert on your website, this number doesn’t really mean anything at all.
Other vanity metrics include page visits, the number of likes on social media posts and number of customers.
A basic rule of thumb is that if it doesn’t result in getting more customers, higher-quality customers or happier customers, it’s not worth measuring.
If you’re looking for actionable metrics to use in your marketing strategy, why not try the following?
- Conversions on your website
- Cost per conversion
- Social media engagement per post
- Follower growth over time
In 2016, Head of the Xbox brand Phil Spencer announced that they were no longer going to report on the number of Xbox sales, a standard vanity metric. Instead, the company made the decision to report on active users of their Xbox Live service, which is a more actionable metric, and more closely tied to Xbox’s revenue.
4. Don’t know what you sell
One of the trickiest parts of writing a marketing strategy is learning about the products or services that you are trying to promote. This is especially challenging if you are writing the strategy on behalf of an external marketing agency.
To help market your products or services effectively, you not only need to know them inside out but how your target audience will respond to them.
A great example of a company that didn’t do its due diligence on their new product is Clairol. In the late 1970s, they launched a ‘Touch of Yoghurt’ shampoo. Unfortunately, the shampoo bombed as customers didn’t want to put yoghurt in their hair as they thought it would go rancid. Some people even tried to eat it!
This could have been an entirely different story if Clairol had done its research and told prospective customers the benefits that using this shampoo could bring.
When you are researching your product or service, think of how it will benefit your customers.
- How will it save your customers time and money?
- How will the products or service make your customer feel?
- What unique selling points does your product or service have in comparison to your competitors?
5. Leave your strategy alone once you’ve finished it
Winston Churchill once said ‘However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.’
When your strategy has been completed and signed off, that shouldn’t be the end of it. You should review it on a regular basis and revise it as required. If you don’t, you run the risk of your product or service stagnating.
I recommend going back to your strategy at least once a quarter to see how things are going. Are you achieving your goals? If not, what can you do to get back on track?
Also, update your strategy with new information.
- Has the market changed?
- Have any of your competitors changed their product or service since your last review?
- Are any elements of your marketing strategy working better than others?
- Has your product or service changed at all?
- Is your marketing budget on track?
This is where having a SWOT or PESTLE analysis as part of your strategy really comes in handy.
In conclusion
98% of marketers believe a marketing strategy is vitally important.
Be this as it may, there are still a lot of badly written and poorly structured strategies out there, and your strategy could be the difference between your campaign succeeding and your campaign failing.
If I can offer you one final tip, it would be to take your time with your marketing strategy. Do thorough research to establish the selling points of your product or service, and the ideal audience you would like to sell it to.
If your manager is demanding that you turnaround a strategy in double-quick time, explain that investing time in your strategy right at the start will ultimately pay dividends for your business.
What are your top tips when it comes to creating a high-quality marketing strategy?
References:
- https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/279360
- https://www.workzone.com/blog/how-to-write-a-marketing-plan/
- https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-to-write-a-marketing-strategy-2951559
- https://smallbusiness.co.uk/write-a-marketing-plan-30441/
- https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/glossary/what-is-a-vanity-metric
- https://www.tableau.com/learn/articles/vanity-metrics
- https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/marketing-plan-examples
- https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/04/06/how-to-market-a-product
