
How to Create Your Marketing Strategy [For Beginners]
In The Crew, we are going to teach you how to structure your marketing plan from the beginning, without being a marketing professional.
In The Crew, we are going to teach you how to structure your marketing plan from the beginning, without being a marketing professional.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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)
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Once you have clear all the process, it's time to start your marketing plan!