Fall has arrived, and with it comes grand plans for the next year. Your company has probably already keyed in on the areas of growth they want to see in the coming year, and now it’s up to you to hit your numbers and make your team look good.
For entry-level marketers, merely hitting your numbers is sufficient, but if you’re developing a comprehensive marketing strategy for your company, you likely hold yourself to a much higher standard. How can you develop a marketing strategy that doesn’t just get your company the results they expect, but also resonates with your customers in a meaningful way?
To some, this may sound idealistic, but the best marketers are able to consistently deliver effective marketing campaigns that resonate with their customers and get results. How’s it done? Research, more research and then putting that research into action.
Start With Robust Customer Research
Customer research is an invaluable tool that’s used by marketers for dozens of reasons. Whether you’re crafting a strategy or crowdsourcing content, effective consumer research is often the best first-step to success. However, the biggest mistake marketers make is not understanding what effective customer research looks like to begin with. Here’s an easy checklist that you can go through when doing customer research for your company:
- Google yourself and your competitors. What differences do you see? What similarities do you see? What advantages do you have against your competitors? What advantages do they have over you?
- Interview three of your best-performing sales reps and three of your worst-performing sales reps. Ask them about your usual customers. What resonates with them? What do they ignore? How do they talk? What kind of language do they use?
- If you can, interview three of your most loyal customers and interview three customers who have left you recently. Why do they like you? What alternatives have they used, and how does your product or service stack up? What has their customer experience been like? What would they improve?
- Next, do some research on data-rich sites like Experian. With a little bit of effort, you can find very rich consumer profiles that give you even more insight into their lives and preferences.
- Finally, dig into online tools like Facebook, Twitter and Google Analytics. Using these tools, you can help determine where your customers live online, what social networks they use, how they use the Internet and what kind of language they use when searching for products and services.
If you have done all of the above, I can pretty much guarantee that you have enough information to start building out an effective marketing strategy.
Document Everything – Even The Mundane
While you’re doing this research, it’s important that you take extensive notes. Every time I’ve done customer research for a client, there’s a piece of relevant information that takes me by surprise. It’s easy to find the big things you’re looking for, but finding the small things can be more difficult. In my experience, however, the small details can make or break a marketing campaign. Here’s a list of things to keep a look out for throughout your note-taking process:
- What kind of words do they use when describing your product? What is their tone like? What is their attitude towards your competitors?
- What other interests or hobbies do they talk about? What do they do when they’re not consuming your product or service?
- What other companies and brands do your customers like? What brands do they dislike? What are the common threads between these brands?
- What is their tone and cadence like when they’re having a conversation? Forget about your product for a minute. If you’re just talking to this person on the train, what do they sound like? Are they articulate? Long-winded? Blunt? Brief? Aspire to speak as they do.
Build a Marketing Strategy Around Tangible Research
Finally, if you’ve done your research right, you can build a marketing strategy around real, tangible research. When building your marketing strategy, you should be able to refer back to the research you’ve done at every turn. Your marketing strategy should answer the following questions, while providing research to support your answer at every step:
- How successful was our last marketing strategy? Did it resonate with our customers, or were they underwhelmed? Why?
- What marketing tactics are we going to use and why? How will these tactics help us reach our target market?
- What does the “customer journey” look like for this marketing strategy? After someone views your ad, what do they do next? Why? How are you walking people to a purchase?
- What outcomes do you expect? Why? Are these in-line with your customers’ expectations? If you’re unveiling a new product, is it something that has been highly-anticipated? If you’re trying to increase the number of up-sells or cross-sells that your team is doing, what’s your current success rate?
Once you’ve built a marketing strategy document that answers these questions while referencing the customer research you’ve done, you’ll be prepared to go to your boss looking like a boss.
If you want more information on building a bulletproof marketing strategy, make sure to download our Digital Marketing Strategy Template by filling out the form below!
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