Marketing strategy, and why you should make sure your business has one
Nicola Denny, MD of May Marketing shares her advice on Marketing strategy, and why you should make sure your business has one.
Every business should have an up-to-date marketing strategy. But for many, large and small, this is often not the case. The most common reasons for this are not having the time to step back from the day job and not knowing where to start.
Finding the time to take a step back and develop a marketing strategy helps save time and reaps rewards. A strategy will:
- Force you to think, align and stay focused on what the business wants to achieve long term
- Offer you a competitive advantage – by being focused you will achieve more
- Maximise your marketing budget
Where do you start?
Think about where your business is now and where you would like to be. Review your goals from different angles including your product and services mix, brand positioning, customer base, the competitive landscape and external environment. Use information such as sales data, customer insights, competitor analysis and lessons learnt, to identify opportunities and challenges. Then map out where you need to focus your marketing efforts to achieve this.
What makes a great marketing strategy?
- Your outlook should be longer term, ideally 3-5 years
- Successful strategies have buy-in from across the business
- The best results come from ambitious but realistic objectives
- It is essential that your strategy is integrated across all channels
- Make sure it is manageable within the budget and resource available
- Following its launch, ensure you are consistently implementing plans
It is important to acknowledge that effectively implementing a marketing strategy takes time and patience. If you do the right work up-front to make sure it’s robust and you consistently implement it, you will see the results.