When you are starting a business there is a lot of things to think about, capital, hire employees, get customers, and probably the budget is not enough to hire an agency to create a whole marketing strategy for your business. That is why we are going to explain to you in a simple way, how to build, step by step, a brief marketing strategy that can be excellent to start.

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Start your Research

Before to start creating a strategy for your business is crucial to understand everything related to it, for that reason you can do a short or long research gathering all the information you consider relevant for your business. For example, in The Crew Marketing, we based our research on gather information about:

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• ‍Industry Context: It is about everything that is currently happening and affects your business. It could be around technology, trends, laws, economy, etc.‍
• Competitors: Its important to check out what are your competitors doing in terms of promotion, products, price and communication channels because from there, you should start to think how to be different or better than them.‍
• Customers: This is the customer's era, so you must know everything about them, but don't worry, it will be impossible at the beginning, but trying to get a close picture of your customer is a great start.
  

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Build your Analysis

It is vital to analyse your business and organise everything you know about it, in order to visualise the impact of each thing on your strategies, such as your business added value, suppliers, brand, partners, employees, and more elements as you consider. This process can be done by creating a SWOT chart, where you are going to list down critical points of your business. Let me explain to you:

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• ‍Strenght: Here, you will organise what elements make your business stand out over your competitors. And you should be able to have an internal control of these elements, such as a strong team, high budget or physical installations.‍

• Weakness: It will be everything you consider an internal weakness in comparison to your competitors, such as a low budget, or small store. Write down next to these elements, how you can solve it.‍

• Opportunities: According to your business elements, and the research is done. Its time to think about the opportunities that are there for your business, like create an online store if your physical store is small, innovate with a groundbreaking idea, or create a unique experience according to your business concept. Remember, all these opportunities are up to you, you can control them.‍

• Threats: are everything that will affect tour business, and you won't be able to control. Or example, weather, economy, laws, or your competitors' actions. The crucial point here is to sort out these potential threats and find a way to take advantage of them.

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Now it's time to start the part we most enjoy at The Crew Marketing, it is describing our clients' audience and creating segments, Targets and Positioning for their brands.

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Build your Audience Segmentation

Here, you are going to divide your customers or audience in broad characteristics, these can be age, economic level, preferences or in a way that is better for you. Our crew usually divide the audience into three different groups, and we give to each group a name.

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Choose your Target

Once you divide your customers into three groups, choose one that represents the most relevant and interesting group of customers for your business. Then, you will describe these people characteristics as a single person or buyer persona. 

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Take a Position

Now, its time to choose the type of positioning is your business going to have. Remember, at this point is vital to keep in mind all the analysis done, it will help you to take the right position in the market.

There are several options to take a position in the market, but our crew choose the following ones:

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• Value: What are you going to offer that is valuable for your customers? It can be tangible or intangible.

• Quality: Is your business offering the best quality service or products?

• Benefit: What is the real benefit your customers have when going to your business?

• Problem and solution: What problem are you solving?

• Price: Its the best price of the market? Or the most expensive or cheaper?

• Leader Position: Are you leading your category?

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Create your Strategy

Objectives

First of all, to start the Marketing Strategy, you must to set up your goals to give a direction for every following step ahead. What we usually recommend to our crew is to set up one general objective and break it down in three more specific objectives, all of them described as SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bound)

Budget

How much capital are you going to invest in your marketing strategy? Establishing a fixed budget will help you to handle and control your marketing strategy more efficient in economics terms.

Product

Now that you have your objectives start defining and describing what are you going to offer. For example, if you are a café, your products are all several types of coffee, desserts, biscuits, etc. Why are different these products and why your customers should prefer you? Here, your positioning plays a prominent role in your product strategy.

Price

How much is it going to cost your product or service to your customers? At this point, it is crucial to keep in mind your positioning and the price your competitors are selling a similar product or service. It's up to you choose the price, but the market gives you an idea if you are struggling when is time to set up an estimate price.

Promotion

Here, leave the imagination fly, there are endless options of how to promote your business. For example, if you are opening a bar, you can promote it through digital campaigns or even hire someone to deliver flyers or coupons to potential customers, around the bar area.

There are many ways to promote your business, but if you want to know more check our post about it! (How to Build Your Promotion Strategy)

Placement

Where are you going to deliver all your previous promotional activities? Choose channels to deliver your promotion tactics. For example, digital promotions can be going through Facebook, Instagram or even Youtube, and traditional advertisement could be provided by billboards, flyers or posters.

The key here is to choose the right channel for your customers and your promotional material.

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Create your Work Schedule

Now that you have basically your Marketing Strategy is time to organise your tactics according to times, channels and duration. The best way to do it is to hold all this data in a chart, which will let you manage and visualise every tactic more efficient.

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Start to Monitoring to Future Improvements

Finally, your marketing strategy is running, however, you should start monitoring its performance in order to modify, extend, or cut out different tactics along its process. Also, this last step is vital, because it will provide you with information to improve future strategies for your business.

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Once you have clear all the process, it's time to start your marketing plan!