Creating a successful marketing strategy is vital for your business and brand. Business owners often believe that simply having an online presence is enough. Although having a website, email list, and social media is imperative, it’s only scratching the surface when it comes to what a marketing strategy looks like.
There are three reasons why a marketing strategy will fail:
Lack of planning.
Before you even begin creating a marketing strategy, you need to determine your goals. Just hopping on social media and starting marketing your business is not the right solution. Every post you create and every comment you make on a post reflects your brand and business. How you engage online really matters. People viewing your content will immediately decide about you and your brand. So be strategic. Sometimes you have to slow down to speed up.
Determine what your core objectives are?
- Do you want to build brand awareness?
- Do you want to build trust?
- Do you want to nurture relationships?
- Do you want to grow your business?
- Do you want to grow your community?
- Do you want to optimize your sales funnel?
- Are you hiring?
- Do you want to build authority?
- Do you want to build your email list?
These objectives are unique in their own way, and your marketing strategy should reflect what you ultimately want to achieve.
If you’re not sure what your core objectives are, you need to find out. We do this at CarbonSilk for our clients and have done it for over ten years.
Lack of patience
Sometimes a marketing strategy fails because they quit. More times than not, this is because there was no planning in place. So after running in circles for weeks or months without a strategy in place, it feels like nothing will work, so they quit.
If you take the time to plan for success, then you’ll find success
Random acts of marketing will eat up your ROI, create frustration and lead to quitting.
Not being aligned with your audiences needs
This right here is the step that we most often see being skipped. Not truly understanding who you are marketing to. Sure, we get it, you sell coffee, and everyone is a potential customer. However, you shouldn’t be talking to everyone with your marketing strategy. You should be talking to that one person who is your brand’s biggest cheerleader and the one that hops in every morning to grab that latte and pastry. The one who still stops in on the weekends with friends and gets excited about every seasonal cup of joe that your team creates. That’s the person you’re talking to!
It goes beyond geographic (which is a physical area that you are targeting) and demographics (which is sex, age, income). It also goes into psychographics (behaviors, lifestyle, attitude).
Aligning with your audience means that you know them and put them first. This isn’t about your personal objectives. It’s answering the question, “What’s in it for THEM?”
What are you trying to achieve when you create your content?
- Do you want to educate them?
- Do you want to solve their problem?
- Do you want them to know you, your employees and your brand better?
By understanding your target audience, you’ll also know where to give your attention when it comes to social media. People use LinkedIn differently than they use Twitter, and they use Twitter differently than they use Facebook. Even Facebook and Instagram are used differently! People listen to podcasts for different reasons than they watch YouTube. There’s no one-size-fits-all here. But when you know your target audience, you know where you can find them and why they are there.
It comes down to this when creating a successful marketing strategy…
Are you ready?
- Know your audience
- Know what they need from you
- Provide it to them
It’s that simple—no need to overthink it because that right there is the secret sauce.
When you focus on your buyer’s needs, you will connect with them emotionally. Every decision we make in life is attached to our emotions, and we feel emotionally drawn to people who get us and our problems. When you connect with your buyer emotionally, they will not only become a customer but share your business with others.
I should warn you that this doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s a process of being consistent. Allow your audience time to get to know, like, and trust you. Speak to them directly, and they will come.
Are you ready to create a successful marketing strategy? We can help save you time, money, and frustration from random acts of posting. Click here to set up a 30-minute discovery call.
Some tools we find helpful:
Jasper (formally Jarvis): AI writing
Social Pilot: Social Media Scheduling
Constant Contact: Email Automation