Whether you’re in the early stages of developing a marketing strategy or are looking to up your game, there are several fundamentals you don’t want to overlook. Marketing needs to be adaptable; you should never expect a strategy to be fool-proof. In fact, a marketer’s job is never done as they must constantly refine their approach and conduct repeated analyses.
Make sure you check that you have these three marketing essentials in place before you dive headfirst into your next campaign.
Budget Variations
Budget is important in any business venture, but a marketing budget requires more flexibility than others. In order to get the best results, you have to gauge your target audience’s response to various ads and find which ones were most effective. For this reason, you shouldn’t invest your entire budget right off the bat into a single tactic, like Facebook ads.
Instead, you should pay for small amounts of advertisements across multiple platforms and determine which ones perform best for your business. Then, you can increase and decrease your advertising budget according to the results in order to maximize engagement and conversion without losing a lot of money.
Buyer Personas
You surely have an idea of who your target audience is, but what about individual buyer personas? Saying that you want to sell to “all homeowners” is too vague, and you’re not likely to gain any traction trying to appease the masses. Instead of trying to create viral marketing content that everyone will love (spoiler alert: it isn’t possible), you need to narrow your focus and target specific types of individuals that reflect your consumer base as a whole.
Buyer personas are fictitious characters that you develop based off facts, statistics and information related to your target audience. Having multiple personas in place will make marketing easier, more personable and, ultimately, more effective.
Diverse Content
Marketing needs diversity to work. You can’t repost the same content on three different platforms and expect any noteworthy results. Instead, focus on creating unique content for each platform so potential customers will always find something new when they look you up on the web.
A diverse range of content across your marketing channels establishes authority and credibility; you demonstrate that you know your industry and have a lot to offer. As you draft your next marketing campaign, make sure that you craft content unique to each platform in your strategy and incorporate the appropriate dimensions, graphics and wording. Hashtags are all the rage on Instagram, for example, but a Facebook post littered with them comes off as amateur.
Customer feedback is vital when it comes to mastering the art of marketing. Every business has a different vision, and your unique objectives will influence the type of campaign you run. Pay close attention to consumer feedback and go out of your way to hear what they like and dislike. Use follow-up emails, surveys and polls to gain further insight and fine-tune your marketing.
With these three principles in mind, you’ll have more room to customize your marketing strategy and come up with one that reflects your business and reaches the right customers.
