In order to run a successful business, you’ll need to devote a portion of your revenue to marketing. The Small Business Administration suggests businesses spend approximately 7 percent of their gross revenue on competitive marketing strategies.
It’s also important for you to make sure that you’re spending your marketing budget wisely. That means coming up with a winning marketing strategy that will help your business grow over time.
Here are the five components that all competitive marketing strategies must have to produce real results for businesses.
1. Market Research
Before you start using a specific marketing strategy, you need to do some market research. You should do your homework on things like:
- The size of your market
- The people who live in your market
- The buying trends taking place in your market
A marketing strategy isn’t going to be a success if it isn’t built on a strong foundation. That foundation needs to be jampacked with market research that you can rely on to help guide your marketing decisions.
2. Well-Defined Target Audience
Once you’ve done your market research, you’ll be able to determine what your target audience will be for your next marketing campaign. You should attempt to hone in on a very specific group of people that you’ll target with your market strategy.
Your target audience might be:
- Teens between the ages of 13 and 17
- Middle-aged men between the ages of 45 and 55
- Young women between the ages of 21 and 28
After you have a well-defined target audience, analyze the group further to see what you can find out about them. Your goal should be to discover everything you can about your target audience so that you can appeal to them with your marketing campaign.
In order to attract customers, Bear Newman from BearFox Marketing advises that you track your customers buying circle to create the best possible communication strategies.
3. Obvious Objectives
At this point, you’ve done your homework on the market that you’re going to target with your marketing strategy. You also know who your target audience is and what they seem to respond to most.
From here, you’ll need to come up with obvious objectives for your marketing campaign. The objectives should spell out exactly what you want people to do once they’re subjected to your campaign.
Some companies launch marketing campaigns to educate consumers about their products. Others launch them to try to convince them to run out and buy those products.
It’s your job to figure out what the goals for your marketing strategy will ultimately be.
4. Firm Budget
If you kickstart a marketing campaign without a budget in place, you’ll be dooming it to fail. Companies often spend way more than they intended to marketing products and services when they don’t have budgets for campaigns.
Crunch the numbers to see how much you can afford to spend on competitive marketing strategies. By sticking to a budget, you’ll get the most bang for your buck from the strategy you choose.
5. Clear Metrics
At the end of the day, you need to have a system that will tell you how successful a marketing campaign was when it’s over. Without this, you’ll struggle to see results from a marketing campaign.
You can use everything from Google Analytics to a simple spreadsheet to track the overall success of your marketing push. It’ll let you know whether or not your campaign was worth the money you invested in it.
Competitive Marketing Strategies Benefit Businesses in a Big Way
Marketing your business is important. But that doesn’t mean you should do it without coming up with competitive marketing strategies.
If your approach to marketing involves simply throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks, you’re going to waste a lot of money. You’re also going to have a tough time creating a strong brand that customers will want to buy into over time.
Get more advice on running a successful business by browsing through our blog.