Are you among the small businesses and professionals who find that they just do not achieve the intended goals or they cannot complete their marketing plans? Marketing plans can fall short for a number of reasons. One common reason for this failure is the business marketing strategy and not the action plans.
There are five measures of a business marketing strategy that must be present if your marketing plan and your tactics are to succeed.
1. Shared goals with business strategy. It is absolutely necessary that you align your business marketing strategy with your business strategy. The marketing strategy needs to emanate from the business strategy. For example, if your plan is to grow your legal practice by promoting a focus on estate planning, it does not make a great deal of sense to advertise a focus on legal defense for juvenile delinquents.
2. Respect the budget. The budget sets the limits for your business marketing strategy. No matter what audience you need to reach or what product or service you are marketing, budgets define reality. You must keep things in perspective within those limits if you expect to meet your marketing objectives.
3. Comprehensive. Your business marketing strategy should outline all of your marketing goals, as well as the tactics you will use to accomplish them. It needs to encompass all of your marketing activities – traditional, internet, mobile, point of sale, etc. But it also needs to allow just enough flexibility to permit you to make some changes in order to take advantage of an unanticipated opportunity with a very high chance of success.
4. A sense of perspective. It is unlikely that you will be marketing a single product or service to a single, specific audience. A successful business marketing strategy will keep all tactics and campaigns in perspective to maintain a focus on marketing objectives.
5. Audience Determined. A good business marketing strategy will reflect significant research into the desires, needs and preferences of your target market. It will, then, use the tactics most likely to reach that audience where they can most commonly be found. It will reflect your understanding of the message they need to hear and the communication medium they prefer.
If your business marketing strategy can pass these five tests, you will be well on your way to crafting a winning marketing strategy that will achieve your goals and grow your business in the strategic direction you want the business to go.