There are a more than a half dozen main marketing strategies that entrepreneurs can choose from to market their businesses—networking, advertising, public relations, and trade show / conference participation to name a few. The question is: Which marketing strategies are the best for your business? While some experts suggest that any of them will work, I disagree. See, I’m a firm believer that everything is not right for everyone. My goal is to help you to become a lofty entrepreneur, not an overworked one.
Therefore, when advising my clients, I explain that which marketing strategy is best really depends on their marketing goals, target audiences and ability to invest in the marketing strategy.
Guideline #1: Determine what your overall marketing goal is.
Most business owners believe that marketing has one purpose and one purpose only: To coax customers to buy a product or service. However, lofty entrepreneurs know that marketing activities can be designed to generate not only sales but also leads or brand awareness. As you choose the marketing strategies you’ll implement for your business, it’s important that you clearly define what your goal is. Your choice will help you to narrow down which marketing strategies are best for your business as well as how your marketing messages should be crafted. For example, if your goal is to generate leads, a public relations campaign to the media is not the best marketing strategy to consider; PR is an indirect way of reaching consumers. Plus, you cannot easily control who will receive your marketing message. Direct mail, on the other hand, is a smart marketing strategy. Why? You can send your marketing pieces directly to those you hope will be your consumers and design a marketing message specifically to peak their interests that will entice them to contact you!
Guideline #2: Choose the most effective ways to reach your target audiences.
You must always keep your potential customers at the forefront of your mind. What “places”—online or offline—do your customers frequent? When are your customers most likely to be open to receiving your marketing messages? It’s important to know the responses to these questions because the marketing strategies that you choose should complement the when and where of your target audiences. For example, if you run a pet grooming service, you may want to focus on marketing your business at local dog parks, pet stores and veterinarian offices. As for the “when” you may want to time your promotions around the holidays, hand out coupons at dog parks on the weekends or broker a co-marketing deal with the vet when they do reminder mailings to their customers.
Guideline #3: Assess your ability to sustain your chosen marketing strategies.
Marketing is something that, by nature, must be repeated several times and be executed on an ongoing basis in order to be effective. Translation: Marketing can be expensive! It can cost you a significant amount of cash, time or both. Therefore, both the time and cost involved in implementing, executing and maintaining your marketing strategies should be considered right from the start. For instance, if you decide you want to establish a blog as another means to reach your target audience, how often will you post content on it? Will you do the writing or will you hire someone to do it for you? If your primary marketing strategy is to reach your target audience via creating YouTube videos or hosting an Internet radio show, how often will you “speak” to your audiences? Do you have the time to create show ideas and find guests? Do you have the budget to make sure the production value of your show / video accurately represents your business’ professionalism? Think through things like this before deciding on each marketing strategy and you’ll save yourself quite a bit of undue hassle later!
While you can technically choose to implement as many marketing strategies as you desire, doing so is not necessarily the wisest decision. The cost of maintaining them all is one very big reason why. However, the most important reason is that attempting to juggle a half dozen or more marketing strategies would be too cumbersome for most small business owners. (Remember: You should be customizing and executing your marketing strategies for each of your target audiences!) Therefore, I recommend that you focus on no more than three marketing strategies. That way, you can perfect your marketing strategies for and maximize the benefits of each one.
Well, that’s it for this week. As always, I’d love to hear from you. So, do share your thoughts on the articles and send me an email from time to time with any questions that you may have.
Tanisha Coffey is a professional writer and marketing consultant based in metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia. She provides her services through the strategic marketing consulting, professional copywriting and independent author services firm Scribe, Etc.
