6 Steps for Rethinking Your Organization's Marketing Strategy
Follow these simple steps and you'll be well on your way to building a successful marketing strategy for your business or organization.
Marketing is essential to any successful operation, and developing a comprehensive marketing strategy is critical for reaching your target audience and achieving your goals. Following are 6 steps to creating a successful marketing strategy for your business or organization.
1. Define your target audience
The first step in developing a marketing strategy is to determine your target audience. Who are you trying to reach — Voters? Association members? Customers?
What are their demographics, interests, and pain points? Understanding who makes up this target audience is will allow you to create targeted and effective marketing campaigns that best resonate with your customers.
2. Conduct a SWOT analysis
Once you’ve identified your target audience, you’ll want to conduct a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of both your business/organization and the market in which you operate. In doing so, you’ll need to identify both your strengths and weaknesses as well as assess the opportunities and threats present. Once this analysis is complete, you’ll be able to better understand your position in the market and develop a marketing strategy that takes advantage of your strengths and opportunities while also addressing your weaknesses and threats.
3. Set specific and measurable goals
Making sure that you’ve set specific and measurable goals is an important part of any marketing strategy. It is important that these goals are aligned with your overall business objectives and should include both short-term and long-term objectives. Examples of marketing goals that you might want to consider include increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, and generating leads.
4. Choose the right marketing channels
The growth of the internet over the last few decades has opened up a myriad of marketing channels for businesses and organizations looking to spread their message — including but not limited to social media, email marketing, paid advertising, direct mail, SMS/text, radio/TV advertising, and more.
Make sure you choose the right marketing channel(s) for your target audience, goals, and budget. It's important to choose channels that will reach your target audience effectively as well as deliver a positive return on investment.
5. Create a content marketing plan
An effective way for you to engage with your target audience and build up brand awareness is through content marketing. You’ll want to develop a content marketing plan that incorporates the type of content you will create, how often you will publish, and how you will promote it. Make sure as well that the content included in your plan is relevant, informative, and valuable to your target audience.
6. Measure and analyze your results
Lastly, don’t forget to measure and analyze your marketing efforts so you can determine how successful your marketing campaigns were and make data-driven decisions for future campaigns. At a minimum, your business/organization should be using reporting tools to manage its website traffic & conversions (Google Analytics), social media (either your in-house social media platform or a program like RivalIQ), and the reporting features from your existing email marketing software.