Rethinking Your Marketing Strategy: A Step-by-Step Guide

by | Apr 3, 2020 | Events | 0 comments

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We’ve heard it on the news. We’ve seen it on TV. Our friends, family and neighbours are all talking about it… tough times are upon us and it’s going to take a long, long time to ride this health, and now financial, crisis out.

With all this being said, and knowing how delicate the current situation is, is this the right time to be writing a blog article on marketing? How on earth can rethinking your business’ marketing strategy help when the odds are stacked against you? 

While we’ll never claim to have all the answers, what we do believe in at Hethel Innovation is making every little action count. While in these uncertain times it may well be tempting to put a pause on your business’ marketing activities, it’s actually the perfect time to take stock, learn and adapt. You may have convinced yourself that no one is interested in your product or service right now, but you may well be wrong. Chances are, if you are thinking this then so are your competitors, and this may give you an opportunity. Use this time that you are working from home or your business’ operations are reduced to rethink how you are marketing your organisation, and where your marketing budget is best spent. 

As marketing expert, Lynsey Sweales, CEO of SocialB, explains in her YouTube video ‘It is critical as an organisation you are still doing online marketing. People are consuming content now more than ever before. And when the market comes back, which it eventually will, you’re going to be ready placed for people who are in the position to purchase your products or services’. 

To help you get started on rethinking your marketing strategy, we’ve broken up the process into the three simple steps below. And if you want even more info, you can join our webinar taking place on Tuesday the 7th of April from 10-11 am. During the free online event, international marketing agency, SocialB, will be discussing everything you need to know about adapting your marketing strategy for the current climate and providing insider tips and tricks. 

Step One: Identify Your Ideal Target Audience

Your ideal target audience is the people you have in mind being the most likely to buy your product or services. Think of your target audience’s demographics- where do they live? Are the majority male or female? What’s their disposable income or business’ spending budget? What are their interests? To find these answers, look at the info you have from your previous and/or current customers and clients. Or, if you’re looking to spread into new markets, look at who is showing interest in your competitors. You can do this by looking at their social media accounts or review sites and seeing what type of people are engaging with their content. 

Step Two: Choose the Right Platforms for Your Business

Once you’ve identified your ideal target audience, next it is time to work out how best to reach this audience and inform them about your products. Choosing which platforms to concentrate your marketing strategy on will also depend on your budget. For example, hiring someone to redesign your website or paying for a PPC campaign (such as ads on Google or Facebook), is likely to cost more than ‘organic’ techniques such as social media and email marketing. Remember, though, that your time is also worth something so even if a platform is free to use, only spend time on it if you’re confident it’s likely to reach your ideal audience. Select a few strategies to focus on (everyone knows the perils of putting all your eggs in one basket) and pick a date in three or six months time to assess your efforts (continue reading to find out how to do this). 

Here’s an idea of just some of the strategies and platforms you may choose to use:

  • Website marketing: creating an e-shop for your products/ services, adding more product/ service information, enhancing your website’s photographs and graphics, producing blog content to draw leads to your site
  • SEO marketing: conducting keyword research, adding more relevant information to your webcopy, adding more inbound and outbound links to your website 
  • PPC marketing (Pay-per-Clicks): creating ads on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube etc. 
  • Email marketing: creating an email campaign to boost sales, creating a regular newsletter for your customers/ clients, buying mailing lists (make sure your email marketing activities comply with GDPR rules)
  • Social media marketing: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, the options are endless!

Step Three: Track Your Performance and Reassess

There’s often a misconception with marketing that it’s all about creativity and out of the box thinking. While this is an important part of marketing, what is equally important is understanding the data which back up the ideas. Being numbers savvy is key to knowing if your marketing strategies are working, plus where to spend your time and budget.

Learning exactly where to gain access to data reports for each marketing activity will depend on the platform you are using. It is also very useful to ask new customers and clients where they heard about your business (e.g. Google, word of mouth, Twitter, radio etc.) and making a note of this to analyse later.

Find out more about accessing useful data on various popular platforms by reading the articles linked below:

Finally, once you have assessed your data reports, you now need to figure out which of your platforms are performing the best and which ones are taking up your resources but not giving particularly much back. Ask yourself if there are any marketing activities you would like to pause, continue or perhaps there are new ideas you want to implement. Once again, keep an eye out on what your competitors are doing, read what the latest marketing trends are and don’t be afraid to ask for help from the experts if you need it!

To learn more, join our free webinar with SocialB on ‘Rethinking Your Marketing Strategy’ on Tuesday the 7th of April by visiting: https://rethinkingyourmarketingstrategy.eventbrite.co.uk/?aff=Article

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