We help you get the right customers at the lowest cost possible
A marketing strategy roadmap is a non-negotiable ingredient in the recipe of success. In the clutter of online advertising, it is essential to take a step back and look at the big picture. Are you struggling with questions like:
Which is the right platform to target my product?
How much budget to put in each platform?
How to track return on marketing spend?
Which demography and geography to go after?
How to price my product and services?
We can help you answer these questions and even more. To top it off, all our strategic decisions are data-based and backed by strong analysis. We help you look at the big picture and create a marketing strategy plan for your long term growth.
If you are still wondering what to do? Just click the link below and get free marketing strategy consultation.
Our Services
We offer a range of services to help you get the best out of your marketing dollar. Below are a few of the services that we offer to our clients.
Market Research
Customer Journey
Customer Retention
Market Positioning
Competitor Analysis
Marketing Strategy
Free Consultation
Get 30 minutes no-obligation consultation at Zero cost. Click the link below.
What is Marketing Strategy?
Modern, digitally empowered customers have caused major shifts in marketing and sales. Businesses and service providers are scrambling to cope with the large amounts of data and analytics required to understand the market. Because only by the analysis of the data collected from customer behaviour can a marketing strategy is planned.
A marketing strategy is the blueprint for the steps that need to be taken for a business to not only improve its visibility but to achieve the long-term goals, reputation, and targets that it seeks to achieve.
A comprehensive marketing strategy employs extensive research and data analysis to help identify and understand customer needs, stay ahead of the competition, and implement the most effective methods of promotion and advertising. That requires the investment of time and resources to the collection and analysis of data. Moreover, it requires a specific skill set and insight to turn that information into actionable goals. It doesn’t serve a business well to be buried under a mountain of data if there isn’t a professional who can sort it. Just as it doesn’t serve a business well to resign their marketing efforts to a trial and error philosophy.
What are the elements of Marketing Strategy?
A good marketing strategy starts with a solid understanding of the company and what it plans to achieve. It might seem simple or basic but it is essential groundwork to recognize the opportunities, goals, and challenges that are most probable.
If your brand faces the challenge of being relatively new in a market dominated by decades old enterprises, the marketing strategy will have to be crafted to generate exposure and visibility.
If your product or service is aimed at a niche demographic, the marketing strategy would have to champion brand advocacy and positioning.
Distinct and well-articulated goals for the brand will let you keep pushing towards a higher goal and improving the customer experience.
Research is key when it comes to marketing. That includes the basic information of the age, gender, location of the customer. But that isn’t enough. Not by a long shot. One also needs to research what their hobbies are, because that will help you understand how they spend their valuable leisure time. What are their shopping habits? Do they prefer paperback books ? Do they read on their Kindle/iPad? Do they prefer audiobooks and podcasts?
These seemingly innocuous questions and data points are crucial in understanding your customer and their persona. A conscientious marketing strategy caters to the customer persona and helps optimize brand positioning.
Competitive analysis is crucial to an effective marketing strategy. It helps in more than the identification and evaluation of your competition’s strategy, messaging, and advertising, it also informs your understanding of the industry. A comprehensive competitive analysis helps you identify industry standards, market trends and the gaps that can serve as inspiration for innovative services and products. It gives a marketing strategy a benchmark, direction, and clarity of purpose.
But running a competitive analysis on even a relatively small business means processing huge piles of information. Information that might go back years, criss cross various industry trends and correlate strategies that might be hard to recognise as connected. For example, competitive analysis isn’t just tracking revenue, media outreach, or social media interaction. It is the tracking and investigation of the actions of the company over the years that led to those numbers and reach. It is the breaking down of the steps in the strategies used by competitors to have achieved those results. Once, the steps are broken down, it is the evaluation of the pros and cons of each step. By identifying the pros and cons, the most efficient way to optimize each step becomes clearer. Also, it helps to identify the ways in which a particular step might be integrated into the strategy best suited to a company depending on its specific objectives and value proposition.
One shoe does not fit all when it comes to a marketing strategy. To understand where and how a company fits into a market, there are a few important questions that need to be answered. What is the price range? Is it on the high or low end of the spectrum? What makes the product unique? Is the demographic that the product is aimed at, specific or wide? Who is the competition? What are their attributes?
Answering these questions helps in formulating the most effective marketing strategy that will in turn transform into the most effective messaging and customer experience.
These are answers that can only be derived from extensive research. Whether a product/service is high or low end, whether there is a product/service similar to and competing with it or not are answers that can only be accurately answered through market research. Who should the product/service be aimed at, who would most benefit from it, who needs it, are answers that should be cross-checked with data.
Our Process
Understanding Your Business
A company, whether it is a service or a product, is a labor of love that has taken a fair amount of time to bring to fruition. It is important for a marketing strategist to understand what that company stands for and what it aims to achieve in the future. That involves extensive research into the company, its history, and its vision for the future. It also requires a thorough analysis of the website and the business model. Frank conversations with the entrepreneur helps the strategist gather the relevant information and evaluate it better.
Defining customer persona
Every product or service aims to address a gap in the market. The customer that it is aimed at has specific needs. Understanding what those needs are, what other features can be integrated into the product/service is what establishes long-term relationships with customers.
Defining a customer persona isn’t a cobbling together of data points of demographics, it is specific. Nothing endears a brand to a customer more than it providing something the customer didn’t know he/she wanted. For example, a mother of three needs a car quite different from the car an investment banker needs. Creating a customer persona specific to each tells you what the person wants in the car he/she needs. What would make a brand’s car stand out from the others that serve the same function. The kind of car a working mother would prefer over one that a homemaker would also provide data point of difference. It helps to get as granular as possible when defining customer persona, because it guides marketing, advertising, and sales.
Creating customer journeys
The customer journey, in the simplest terms, is the series of interactions customers have with a brand. This includes pre-and post-purchase interactions. Creating a customer journey involves the setting up of touchpoints. These touchpoints are optimized for engagement and data collection.
The customer journey is at the heart of their experience with the company. They are as important as the product/service provided. The goal is to make the customer journey irresistible and seamless. With marketing tools like creative designs, content, and social media, touchpoints are created to attract and engage customers.
Setting up tracking and analytics
The various touchpoints along the customer journey help track customer engagement, their experience, and purchase patterns. Each of these touchpoints is micro-conversions, in which the consumer is attracted to and engaged with the product/service. And, at each of these touchpoints, we learn more about the consumer. It is extremely important that each touchpoint be mined for as much data as possible. The analytics need to be set up such that it can efficiently gather data on each touchpoint. Each touchpoint needs to be tracked, and the data at each touchpoint needs to be collected.
The data thus accumulated by tracking the journey is then analyzed.
Formulation of an action plan
Based on the preliminary analysis of the data collected from the customer journeys, an action plan is formulated and implemented. The plan will be based on the insights gathered and will have within its various steps certain touch points set up. Analytics are run on the touch points and the results of the plan itself to verify if the customer journey correlates. This tests whether the actionable insights have been successfully integrated into the plan.
Verifying the customer journey by data
The success or failure of integrating the customer journey with the initial plan is verified by data analysis. This analysis of the customer journey helps identify the gaps within the plan and also helps formulate ideas to set up effective touchpoints.
Creating the marketing strategy (Which platforms to use, which methods to use, which audience to tap, what should be the tone/messaging on each platform) etc
Once the data from customer journey verification has been accumulated, a comprehensive marketing strategy is constructed. Keeping in mind, the intended audience, future aims and objectives of the company, every detail is mapped out. That includes the identification of the different platforms and tools that will be used. The nuances of the language and tone that should be used on each platform is carefully thought-out to ensure consistency. The use of the different forms of content to create touch points, their uniformity, and how they can be used to personalize each customer’s journey is carefully mapped out.
Creating the media budget and media plan
The media budget is planned for the different touch points. At different touch points of the customer journey, different media plans with varying content are executed. These are mapped out across the journey and the budget allocated likewise to optimise efficacy.
Tracking and analyzing the performance
There is no such thing as “Wish on a star and forget about it” when there is money involved. Once a marketing plan has been implemented, it needs to be tracked. Performance metrics and data analytics help track and analyse the efficacy of an action.
A communication channel may or may not be producing the intended results. The performance of each channel needs to be monitored and analysed to identify the possible gaps that need to be addressed. A metric needs to be set to evaluate the performance of each different channel. If it is yielding the expected results, the data gathered needs to be evaluated to get actionable insights to optimise it.
Collecting feedback
Once a customer journey has crossed the touchpoint of purchase, the collection of feedback is crucial. Not just to ensure better performance, but also to establish loyalty. Feedback, especially feedback that can lead to personalisation, advocacy of the product/service, and bonding is essential. Proactive personalization based on data gathered from the customer’s journey is essential in forming loyalty. The data required to do so is gathered from different sources, catalogued, screened for relevance, and incorporated to improve the customer’s experience. The engagement during the feedback stage in itself provides data that can be analysed for insights.
Repetitively and continuously improving the performance
Start simple and keep building and improving from there. Whether it is with a data set, start with the simplest, implement an action plan, analyse outcome, optimise performance. Integrate larger, newer data sources gently, analyse, implement, and repeat.
Conclusion
The key of a successful and comprehensive marketing strategy is the ability to collect and analyse data efficiently and to establish a feedback loop between data, insight, and action. Marketing Strategy at its barebones is the creative use of data to create a story, a community, and journey for the customer.
Free Consultation
Get 30 minutes no-obligation consultation at Zero cost. Click the link below.