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Marketing Strategy

Before you create your marketing strategy it is vital you know your market segments. Once you know who your customers are (is) you are going to be in a lot better position to come up with a marketing strategy to suit them...laser targeting. We've all seen videos of bombs dropped in the second world war and later on where bombs are being guided by lasers to hit their intended target with 99.9% accuracy. Quite clearly the latter is the better option (unless you're the recipient of course) in terms of success of delivery to the intended target.

Marketing strategy is also used to implement your business strategies.

Let's suppose you want to grow your sales for instance. Your marketing strategy then might be to increase your product range, open up more physical shops or expand them, have a web presence if you didn't before or maybe start to sell your product overseas. You might want to increase your business profits in which case your marketing strategy might be to increase / decrease selling prices, reduce your advertising spend. Or maybe you want to increase your customer awareness in which case your marketing strategy might be to invest more money on advertising on the right channels.

Once a marketing strategy has been identified, then the business must develop an action to turn the strategy into a reality. The starting point for this plan is the setting of marketing objectives.

Marketing objectives are the specific targets for marketing set by your business.

Examples of marketing objectives are:

  • Increase sales by 15%
  • Increase profits by 10%
  • Launch a sucessful new product by the end of the 3rd quarter
  • Achieve over 90% customer satisfaction rating
  • Increase the number of retail outlets selling your products by 20% within 12 a year

It is important for a business to set marketing objectives because managers can then have targets for their work. They can then measure more effectively the success or failure of their marketing strategies to achieve these objectives. Make sure though that your goals are realistic and achievable - it can just cause depression and panic within the workforce if your targets are "out of this world"...having said that - don't set too easy a target - you don't want to be paying people good rates and awarding bonuses for achieving easy targets...when you could have achieved more from your sales team.

Check out the following articles on how to advertise your business and how to advertise your business for free.

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