It goes without being said that a strong marketing plan is a key to a successful business. Whether you’re a big corporate house or a small start-up, marketing is the driving force behind sales. Taking the time to regularly develop marketing strategies and devise new plans for remaining relevant in the minds of consumers is what decides the success of a business.
The purpose of a marketing plan is to determine how you can sell your products or services to consumers. The plan should focus on the target audience who are most likely to buy the product. When consumers are aware of their requirements, and they’re presented with a solution, the likelihood of their buying the product increases. The possibility of getting a sale is less likely if the customer doesn’t see a need or extreme desire.
Marketing is at the core of every business. For a business to succeed and do well, it is essential to have a healthy marketing system. In the absence of marketing, even ground-breaking products or services will go unnoticed by customers. A good marketing strategy has the following advantages:
- Once you become visible to your audience and your brand enters their consciousness, your chances of selling your products or services are greatly enhanced. Also, the name of your company and the quality of your products or services is likely to spread by word of mouth.
- Marketing is an essential tool in establishing your brand and making it the foremost option in the minds of customers. It presents a tremendous opportunity for anyone to share expertise, experience, and insight with the world.
- The success of your company will be based on having a strong reputation. Marketing helps in building reputation, and as your reputation grows so will sales.
- Marketing will enable you to not just retain customers but also create a following of loyal customers. This is important to retain one’s position when new and trendy products enter the market.
- When you use marketing strategies to promote your product or service, your sales are boosted and you reach the intended target audience faster. You can also get discovered by your audience and you can engage with them in an effective manner.
Marketing plans and strategies are therefore crucial because they help make sales easier for businesses. Targeting your ideal customer in a smart manner means a reduction in marketing costs and increasing your chances of converting leads into sales.
Marketing strategy can be a game-changer as far as the success of a start-up is concerned. It has been observed that by and large start-up founders are not novices when it comes to the various aspects of marketing. One of the sure shot ways to overcome this hurdle is planning. Any marketing plan needs an outline:
- Requirement for a start-up marketing plan
- Components of a marketing plan
- Identification of customers
- Track buyer journey
- Make a place for yourself apart from the competition
- Incorporate niche specific marketing ideas
- Identify marketing channels
- Start-up marketing channels
- Social media
- Search engine optimization
- Email marketing
- Paid marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Blogs and public relations
- Affiliates and referrals
- Measure your marketing performance
- Be prepared to make changes
A marketing plan can help start-ups in the following ways:
- Knowing customers and competitors
- Describing products and services
- Evaluating the effectiveness of marketing strategy
- Clearing up the position of services and products in the market
- Recognising and employing various marketing approaches
Trying out the approach given below could most certainly prove to be a winner.
1. Branding
Creating and developing a unique brand is key to staying ahead in the game. Be it your name, URL, or logo- they all need to be one of a kind. This is where your creativity needs to be at its best. Once you get the name and URL sorted, move on to creating the right look and feel. Try to come up with a logo that will pique the interest of all concerned parties, including customers, partners, and employees.
2. Strategising
Identify whom your customers are going to be and why they should buy from you. Define the category that your product or service belongs to and elaborate on its benefits and competitive pricing. This needs to be done for at least the first 12 to 24 months. It is essential to get the core messages, plans, objectives, and launch strategies right at the very beginning itself.
3. Making your presence felt on the web
A multi-role-playing sophisticated website is crucial in the present age of digital marketing and social media along with a robust Facebook fan page, a dynamic Twitter page, and a vibrant blog site. Facebook apps, iPhone apps, and web apps are additional requirements. Make sure you get the content and structure of your web page right. It needs to be embedded with visual elements, relevant keywords, and SEO tags. It is also important that your website is accessible by all means of user’s devices, including tablet, mobile, desktop, or laptop.
4. Digital public relations
A partnering program and a digital public relations strategy are essential to promote not only networking, communications, and traffic, but also to monitor online reputation, conversations, and word of mouth. It is important to integrate your digital public relations and partnering program with your sales goals, in order to help boost revenues and users. Expertise should be gained in advanced digital public relations techniques like viral, community, word of mouth, and crowdsourcing to augment daily digital public relations and partnering tools. Customer and business development communications plus media outreach and the standard blogger must be a part of the digital domain public relations.
5. Blogging
A successful blog is key to all businesses. Blogs have become an essential element of modern social marketing and communications strategy. Blog sites should be set up appropriately and managed competently by professionals. The other elements required to run a successful blog include the appointment of writers, development of editorial strategies, implementation of guest programs, and careful planning and production of content. The objective of a blog is to augment the company’s strategic positioning, define messages, credentials, and benefits and promote the company’s product or service category. SO, make sure that your blog works for you.
6. Viral videos
A substantial rise in awareness and word of mouth can be achieved by viral videos and guerilla marketing programs. However, attention must be paid to produce and execute them carefully to avoid backlash. Great original ideas, content, and production all come under the ambit of viral videos or games and guerrilla activities. In many cases, the cost of producing viral videos is negligible. What’s important is creativity and healthy humor.
7. Link building and SEO
To ensure that your Digital Public Relations and social media marketing activities, your blog, and your web presence have a solid technical foundation and that they can get amplified with the dynamic deliverable by the internet, it is important to apply algorithmically as well as semantic SEO to your web presence. It is essential to research keywords, develop and extend them and use them to drive your content. Also, make sure to coordinate a link spreading and link baiting strategy with the social media and digital public relations marketing program.
8. Strategise public relations
These days public relations depend to a great extent on digital public relations activities. Your public relations strategy has to be unique and innovative if it has to capture the imagination of the target audience. Once your brand has developed and reached a certain level, research-driven public relations or high-profile awareness campaigns can be developed. This can further extend to media, including radio and TV.
9. Advertise online
Once you know more about your product or service, brand, market, users, prospects, partners, and clients, you are better positioned to create and develop impactful advertising programs. For starters, a Google Ads program is highly recommended because it is flexible, scalable, cost-effective, and results-oriented. Others such as Facebook ads and banner campaigns and Yahoo or Bing are also good options.
10. Campaigns via crowd-sourcing
Crowd-sourcing is the new entrant in the social marketing arena. Many large brands and corporations are utilizing the power and influence of the crowd for marketing and development, viral content, and contest-based campaign ideas. Looking into what campaigns have a better impact on the business can help you discover campaigns that will drive outstanding results.
11. Speaking and briefing
After your brand has made a name for itself and there is awareness about the brand, it is essential to develop a media briefing or a highly targeted peaking program to ensure that your brand remains not just relevant but also foremost in the minds of the consumers.
Creativity can sometimes be difficult to exercise, but there are actionable things marketers can do to maintain a creative outlook on social marketing strategies. Looking for a social media agency to help you plan, execute and analyse all your social campaigns? Here we are!
At Trigacy Agency, our endeavour is to assist you with your startup’s branding, and marketing. Our marketing services include website design, SEO, content writing, social media marketing, and video animation. We help you take care of your marketing requirements by simplifying your business processes and organizing your team. We stand committed to boosting your sales in a budget-friendly manner. Our services will not only help your product carve a niche in today’s competitive market, but also ensure that your products and services remain at the forefront of customer consciousness.
Our team provides excellent insight into the needs, challenges, successes of our customers. This insight helps in generating content that addresses needs and highlights successes. Contact us at once and let us help your business grow from strength to strength!
