Session 36: 2017 Marketing Strategy Development

In session 36 of A Marketing Podcast, I’m talking about 2017 Marketing Strategy Development. It’s that time of year to get your strategy developed and ready for the new year. In this session, I walk through the strategy template I’ve developed and outlined some of the tricks and tips to help you fill out each section and develop a strategy that’s going to make it easy to be successful in your marketing.

Session 36: 2017 Marketing Strategy Development

This session focuses in on the sections of the FREE 12 Page Marketing Strategy Template. You can Download it right here!

Theory behind the template

* Helps marketers develop a logic approach to establishing the tactics and marketing mix that will achieve your strategies goals and objectives

* Helps marketers and small business owners develop budgets that make sense by pairing back the best strategic approach to an obtainable budget amount. More on this later.

Establishing Goals and Objectives

[Related: Session 3: Establishing goals and objectives]

What a Goal is? What an objective is? It’s important to understand the difference so that they work together to achieve what it is you want for your business in relation to your marketing outcomes.

Create goals before objectives, and make sure that your objectives lather up to each goal. It’s also important to create goals that are obtainable, but still, push your marketing to achieve something worth achieving.

Understanding and Developing your target audiences

[Related: Session 4: Understanding and developing your target audiences]

There is always more than one target audience for your business. Make sure to consider them all and establish a good range of target audiences, whilst ensuring that your marketing makes sense to target each audience.

Developing target audiences can be performed in many ways. However, I like to divide the initial creation of target audiences into two main groups. Current customers, and potential customers.

Talk with your current customers to develop various target audiences based on information they provide.

Then work on establishing target audience of potential customers. Those that haven’t used your product or service yet. Or even whole industries and markets that don’t know that your business product or service, could be a fit.

Performing a Marketing SWOT Analysis

[Related: Session 5: Performing a marketing SWOT analysis]

A marketing SWOT is different than a business SWOT.

It can be used as an analysis, or audit, of your past marketing efforts as well as helping you establishing the environment for your initial marketing efforts for your 2017 marketing strategy.

* Strengths – use them to position your business above your competitors

* Weaknesses – Should you improve them, or avoid them?

* Opportunities – get some advice on developing/identifying opportunities as you may not be able to see them from within your business.

* Threats – again work with someone external to help identify threats, and decide whether to avoid them or tackle them head on. Both have the potential for a high level of success but tread lightly.

Creating Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

[Related: Session 6: Creating your unique selling proposition]

Your unique selling proposition is crucial in setting your business apart from your competition.

It’s important to note what a USP is not!

There are three main questions to answer that help you develop you...