Holes in Your Marketing Strategy?

Marketing requires structure.

Sometimes the marketing process has many flaws that it can be difficult to notice when looking at it as a whole entity. As if working to get your business up and running isn’t enough, it feels like it can be a constant onslaught of spinning plates. When it comes to marketing your business, it can be solved by a simple word—Preparation. The best defense is a good offence they say, and so if you back up your offences first i.e. plan the strategies properly, it will save you many headaches down the line. So, how can the marketing for your business be boosted?

Firstly, the task of marketing comes with many other smaller tasks. The five key ones are:

• Creating or implementing the resources
• Increasing the visibility of the business or creating leads
• Choosing the correct platforms for social media
• Delivering or producing the content
• Keeping up to speed with current trends or technology updates. Using technology consultants will help with this aspect

With the tasks being broken down into more manageable chunks, this is easier to see what your company needs to market your products. If you are a small company, there may not be enough time to complete all the tasks with as much detail as you would like. This will cause the holes in your marketing plan. So, what do we do with the plan itself?

SME’s and startups will always have the issue of stretching their staff to its absolute limit. Having teams to exclusively generate marketing plans will always be difficult. So if you plan ahead and have a marketing plan in place that you stick to and not deviate from at all has many benefits:

• It acts as a business manifesto.
• It will keep your focus on the ethos and intentions of the business.
• The goals are laid out for you.
• It will reduce the temptation to attempt copying other business’s models.
• It is a way to save money, as well as time. It will be saving you money from the point of view of not throwing money away at other plans that you hope will work on a whim.

Use the marketing plan to help the company, and to give your scope more definition. You can use the plan to:

• Determine the goals you have in your marketing. This will increase brand visibility and will help to generate leads of good quality.
• Pinpoint your specific strategies of marketing. Examples include a presence in social media, direct marketing, marketing by email, online or offline event marketing and the content marketing.
• Outline the activities that you shall use with each appropriate strategy. So, you need to figure out which actions make the most sense for the market you are targeting. This is a good way to manage your resources.

Once this has been done, you can then create:

• The plan of action. This can be a simple schedule to detail each step.
• The calendar. This will allocate specific time frames to complete tasks, which help maintain focus.

Marketing requires structure. If you don’t have that in place, start to do it!