Creating a Winning Marketing Strategy in 2020

Marketing isn't about purchasing a one-off advertising placement or depending on a tactic that's doing a good job at generating sales. You need to have a clear and cohesive strategy that is systemized and designed to help your business grow.

However, many business owners may find it challenging to build a good marketing strategy.

There is an overwhelming amount of information and it can be hard to know what strategies apply to a particular business or business model. To make things simple, here's a four-step process that you can follow to build a winning marketing strategy.

Step One: Understand Your Business Goals

The first step is to figure out what your business goals are. While generating sales and profits is the common goal, you need to look beyond that.

A local gym may decide that the first goal is to sign up 100 members to cover the monthly lease, pay off equipment loans, and pay their employees. The gym can start setting new goals after the initial one has been reached.

Every business will have different goals. The best way to come up with your own unique goals is to think about what you need to achieve to sustain your business, what kind of numbers you want to see to ensure steady growth, and how you're going to build a strong brand.

Don't forget that goals also evolve as your business changes and grows. To help you maintain your goals, you should start with small goals until you start to make progress and hit milestones as your business grows.

Step Two: Identify Your Target Audience

The next step is to understand who your target audience is. A common mistake that business owners make is generalizing their target audience.

For instance, a juice bar may assume that their target customers are people who care about their health. But generalizing doesn't help you develop a clear marketing strategy.

Who exactly are these people that care about their health? You’ll want to drill down from there to learn more about them.

You may discover that people that visit yoga studios are great customers. You may find that people that take CrossFit classes are also a good audience to target with your marketing. You may be surprised to find that bodybuilders are a bad fit because they're primarily interested in gaining mass and muscle.

You’ll also want to look into other demographic information like age, race, sex, income, and other data that can help you identify audiences. This will help you to target the best audiences with precise accuracy when launching your marketing campaigns.

Step Three: Determine Your Value Proposition

Your value proposition is a short statement that describes the benefits your product or service offers. It can also be a statement that describes how your product or service solves your target prospect's problem.

Before you even start to create a marketing campaign, you need to have a value proposition for a strong sales presentation.

For example, a plastic surgery clinic may offer a 50% reduction in wrinkles with a $200 treatment. This brings more patients to their door instead of their competitor who doesn’t take the time to create a winning value proposition.

It's even better if you can come up with a unique value proposition that very few businesses can offer. You may be the only business that picks up and drops off pets for grooming rather than having the owners visit your store.

Regardless of what marketing channels you use, having a good value proposition will give you a strong foundation when you start selling your product or service.

Step Four: Figure Out the Best Way to Deliver Your Content to the Right Audience

Finally, you want to figure out the best way to deliver your content to the right audience. You have many options available to you from email, social media, SMS, and even a blog.

Start publishing your content on multiple platforms and track the data. By doing this, you’ll figure out how your audience is interacting with your content.

It's also important to dig into your data and figure out what kind of content your audience and customers want, as well as what platforms to avoid. For example, if your target audience is older than 30, Snapchat may be the wrong platform for your business.

Spending resources on this channel will probably be a waste of time, money, and energy. Instead, do your research and use the right platform to reach your ideal customers.

Start Creating a Winning Marketing Strategy

In conclusion, you need to have these foundations down to create a winning marketing strategy. Once you figure out what your business goals and your customers are, creating profitable marketing campaigns will be easier. You can then rely on your data to make the next big decisions for your marketing and business strategy to grow your business!

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes