How to Get the Most out of Your Marketing Strategy

Businesses don’t all run the same way.  That doesn’t mean you can just wing it and hope to make money though.  Creating and implementing a marketing strategy unique to your business will help you grow your business.  An effective marketing strategy will give you your plan of action to promote your business.  It can be your north star, giving you direction when nothing else will.

In order to get the most out of your marketing strategy, we suggest you follow the specific strategies outlined below.  Adding this to your overall sales strategy should give your business the plan it needs to increase revenue.

8 strategies to focus your marketing

Strategy #1 Understand your audience

First, determine who your audience is.  Their age, their gender, where they live and work.  What do they like?  What do they listen to?  What do they watch?  What social media platforms do they prefer?

If you are marketing towards government organizations and c-level executives, you’re going to be better off sticking to LinkedIn, industry-related publications, email marketing and beefing up your website.  If you’re marketing a specific product to Millenials in particular, you may hit Instagram, YouTube and website blogs.  You’ll also want to make sure you match their values and give them the opportunity to engage instantly.

Knowing your audience is going to help you target the right people, saving you time and money.

Strategy #2 Set your goal, objectives and budget

Based on your company’s overall goals, you’ll want to set your marketing goals, your objectives to get you there and the budget for achieving it.

Making sure you have all of this spelled out in advance will help keep you on track and within budget.

Strategy #3 Create quality content

As part of your overall marketing strategy, make sure to add a content marketing strategy.  Your content marketing will help your search engine optimization (SEO) and elevate you as an expert in your industry, while strategic link building can amplify these benefits, but be mindful of the associated costs of link building for an optimal ROI.

Part of your content strategy should include blogs, which will accomplish both objectives above.  Provide informative and quality blogs that are industry-relevant and chock full of keywords.  These can be placed within your website and shared with business publications online, such as Forbes or Huffington Post or many others, depending on your industry.

Strategy #4 Frequent social platforms

Post early and often on your chosen social media platforms.  Make the posts high-quality and relevant as well and make sure to engage with your followers.  No need to publish to all of the platforms if they don’t all make sense in your industry.  Pick the ones your audience visits most and focus on them.

LinkedIn and Facebook both offer very effective means to target your audience directly.  If these two platforms are in your strategy, you’re in luck as far as targeting goes.

Videos that include tutorials, explainer videos or company introductions can be very effective as well.

Strategy #5 Focus on SEO

No marketing strategy would be complete without mentioning SEO.  Make sure your website is optimized with SEO-friendly keywords and SEO titles that will grab your audience’s attention, while grabbing the search engines’ attention.

You’ll want to gather a list of keywords that you want included throughout your website, then break them down by each page.  Make sure you use the keywords often without saturating them, which makes your website seem like spam.  An old trick that was once used and now a big faux pas was to fill the metadata fields with lots of keywords.  You want to earn your SEO with quality, strategic content, not try to trick the search engines.  They are too smart for that.

Strategy #6 Listen and learn

Take a look at how your partners and competitors are marketing.  See which social media platforms they use and what their blogs are about.  Determine what you can do similarly, without plagiarizing, and what you can do to differentiate yourself from your competition.

Also, listen to your customers.  If they mention your business or your products on social media, be ready to respond.  When they contact your customer service, resolve issues quickly and document them for future use.  Paying attention will help you learn from your successes and failures and continuously improve.

Strategy #7 Understand affiliate marketing

If it works in your particular industry, seek out affiliates to promote your products or services.  You’ll gain credibility by getting others to mention you and you won’t have to pay a whole lot for it.  Neil Patel describes the idea behind being an affiliate marketer as someone who promotes products, often through an affiliate network, earning a commission if people end up buying it.

Make sure affiliates you choose are relevant to your industry or who have good reason to promote your products.  In a gig economy as we have today, you should be able to find people or organizations willing to promote your business for a commission.

Strategy #8 Run ads

Advertising is still very effective today.  You can still run ads in print media, but you may want to look at running them on social media platforms or electronic ads on industry-relevant websites.

Running an ad on Facebook, for instance, gets it in front of the audience of your choice.  It is completely targeted, cost-effective and graphically attention-grabbing.

Conclusion

Creating your marketing strategy is really just the first step.  Implementing it is the next challenge.  In order to do so effectively, you may want to initiate the use of an effective CRM to help you with all of your sales and marketing needs.

Agile CRM by 500 apps is one such software that has enhanced marketing features such as Marketing Workflow Automation, Landing Page Builder, Email Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Email Tracking and Social Suite.  These features along with the contact management, appointment scheduling and deal tracking will help your sales and marketing teams get to the next level.

Your marketing strategy, if done correctly, is going to help you reach your goals and set you up for success.  Following these 8 strategies will help get you there.  If you would like to see if Agile CRM is right for your sales and marketing teams, try it for free for 30 days.