Marketing Strategy
Your strategy will depend on where you want your business to go – it forms part of your overall business aims.
The following are examples of what your overall business aim might be, and marketing strategies that you could use to achieve it:
- Increase sales
- Bring in new customers
- Get existing customers to buy more
- Introduce a new product or service
- Increase market share
- Better establish your brand
- Improve customer loyalty
- Launch an advertising campaign
- Launch a PR campaign
- Encourage word of mouth
- Increase market share
- Retain existing profitable customers
- Make customers feel more valued
- Offer existing customers exclusive offers
Ensure business stays fresh and new
Whatever your marketing strategy covers, you should definitely put it down in writing.
Make everything simple to understand, realistic, and with a clear path of action.
It will then become part of your longer and more detailed marketing plan, which is the document that deals with a more overarching and long-term view of your business (and so makes up a section of your business plan).
Be ready to adapt your marketing strategy as and when necessary – there are an infinite number of factors that could require a change. It’s flexibility that’ll keep you ahead of the competition.
How to develop a marketing strategy
Step-by-step Research. You need to carry out detailed analyses of these three areas:
Market analysis: the size of your market, how quickly its growing, your customers and their spending and lifestyle habits.
Competitor analysis: monitor both direct and indirect competition and how they compare with you on every aspect of sales and marketing (their customers, their brand, price, convenience of location, sales channels, and so on).
Company analysis: your overall business objectives, how you are going to achieve them, your strengths and weaknesses and those of your products or services.
Here are the 5 essential strategies CMOs and marketing leaders need to implement today:
1. Make It Easy for Consumers to Call You
The first and most basic strategy marketers are adopting is adding phone numbers to their digital ads, offline campaigns, websites, and mobile apps. Making it easy for consumers to call you is both a fundamental step in increasing marketing ROI and an important part of acquiring and retaining customers who want to talk to you before making buying decisions
2. Capture Complete Attribution for Every Call Conversion
Perhaps the most important strategy for marketers to adopt is call attribution. It’s critical to capture the same granular level of data for call conversions that your team does for online conversions. This call data is necessary to measure the true CPL, CPA, and ROI of every marketing activity, prove marketing’s full impact on the business, and optimize performance to generate more customers while lowering acquisition costs.
3. Integrate Call Data With the Tools in Your Marketing Stack
Calls are an important data source marketers are integrating with the tools in their marketing stack. This enables marketers to get a more holistic view of the customer journey and know how to best allocate budget and optimize campaigns to generate the greatest return. It also enables digital marketers responsible for search, social, and display advertising to more accurately target the consumers most likely to call.
4. Personalize the Caller Experience to Convert More Calls to Sales
To improve conversion rates over the phone, marketers are now taking responsibility for the call channel – whether calls are going to a call center, remote sales agents, or multiple business locations. They are using the call data captured at the time of the call to tailor and optimize the caller experience to win new customers and upsell existing ones.
Three Strategies to Improve the Caller Experience
Route callers optimally to close more sales:
When shoppers call, they expect to get assistance and answers right away. It’s important to connect them quickly in conversation with the right agent or business location. To do it, marketers are adding contextual call routing strategies to their marketing campaigns, ads, and websites. They are using intelligence captured on each call – including the marketing source, caller location and history, and day and time of the call – as signals to determine where each caller should be sent.
Prioritize your most valuable callers:
Marketers are also using call data to better serve their most valuable callers. For example, some businesses have a priority queue where they place callers they believe have the highest purchasing intent and sales value, ensuring those calls get answered immediately. Some do this based on marketing source – with calls from search ads being the most common leads to get prioritized. But others do it based on a caller’s past history or the web page they called from.
Pass data on callers to sales agents before they answer:
When calls come in, some businesses pass information on the caller and marketing source that drove the call to their sales agents before they answer. Knowing that a call is coming from a specific marketing campaign, referral source, keyword search, or webpage helps sales agents anticipate a caller’s needs and deliver a more seamless, personalized experience to win the sale.
This strategy also improves marketing-sales alignment, a common source of friction for many companies, in two ways. First, it helps marketers arm their sales agents with information to better handle calls. Second, it provides sales agents with regular proof of how marketing is sending them quality leads.
