A well-orchestrated marketing strategy provides organizations with many advantages. Entrepreneurs may often rely on intuition or wait for the next great idea before adapting their marketing approach. However, consistently successful marketing requires consumer data. Strategic analysis of who your customers are and what they want is essential to achieving your business goals.

Producing an effective marketing analysis typically involves the following steps:

1. Company snapshot

Regardless of your product or service, targeting your prospects requires not just understanding who your best customers are, but what the competition is offering them. Then determine what your company can provide that indicates better value to consumers.

This requires putting together an objective overview of your business’ strengths and weaknesses. Study your competition and compile a list of ways that your product or service is superior to or different from others. This could be quality, pricing, incentives, fast delivery, and so on. Weaknesses could be limited technologies, supply chains, or staff.

Strategic analysis also involves identifying the kind of opportunities you can leverage and the risks or threats that may result. Network expansion, new innovations, distinctive styling, or other advantages could lead to more market opportunities if you can implement them. Also consider threats such as big corporate competition or legal issues that could limit your market share. Your plan should include provisions for countering these risks.

     2. Target audience

To identify your target audience, you need to develop a customer profile. Understand your most likely buyers in terms of demographics: age, gender, location, income level, family situation, and more. While excessive details can cloud the picture, you want an accurate but concise overview of who will be considering your product. You should also understand how they tend to make purchases. Online or offline? In what sizes, colors, or quantities? How often do they purchase?

Business-to-business providers will want to segment customers based on industry, company size, location, credit standings, and other criteria that are important to your continued success. No matter what your offer is, it’s essential that you perform a strategic analysis of who potential buyers are in order to establish the best content and medium for connecting with them.

3. Marketing objectives

A strategic market analysis is most effective if you establish clear goals. The success or failure of each campaign can be determined by how well those goals are achieved. For example, if your goal is to increase sales of product X by 15 percent over the next quarter, falling short or exceeding that number will tell you whether you can invest more in that campaign or need to come up with a better plan. It’s important to keep a list of both long and short term goals, and provide a means of measuring the result of your efforts.

4. Communications strategy

The core of your marketing campaign comes down to outlining the communication tactics you need to employ. Now that you’ve developed your product appeal, defined your target market, and established your objective, it’s time to decide how best to connect these ideas in terms of your marketing content.

Your strategic market analysis should target your audience at every stage in the sales cycle. Some ideas, such as print ads or press releases, may be used to attract cold prospects. Once they’ve expressed interest, you can see them as warm prospects and send them personalized emails, incentives, or links to further information. Hot prospects are those who’ve progressed to the point where they’re genuinely considering the purchase, but may still have doubts or questions.

Personal contact of some kind may be needed to close the deal. Strategic market analysis can also deliver your support teams the information to make sales.

5. Set a budget

Get used to the idea of making sales projections so that you can allocate enough funds to cover your marketing expenses without eating into your profit margins. For small or new businesses with the confidence to form aggressive marketing campaigns, this may require seeking additional capital from lenders or investors. Marketing is unavoidable when it comes to growing your company, but when it comes to financing it, marketing should be seen as a business expense like any other. It’s important to ensure that you’re getting the best possible return on your investment.

Keep adjusting your marketing strategy to find the best-performing tactics with the least expense. Never stop developing market strategies. As success comes and business grows, you can move up to more ambitious plans.

Blog: Guest Post            Author: Robert Cordray

Kalyan Banga

226 entries

27 comments

Profile Status

ACTIVE

Profile Info