Effective marketing is essential to business success.
Unfortunately, many businesses fail miserably at it.
For example, only 22% are genuinely satisfied with their rates of conversion. In other words, roughly 4 out of 5 businesses see room for marketing improvement.
Of course, any number of reasons could contribute to substandard marketing success. However, a lack of strategy is often at the heart of the problem. Without an adequate strategy, marketing efforts can lack cohesion.
It’s like shooting in the dark at a moving target. Efforts and budgets get wasted in the process.
Strategic marketing is key to overall success. A considered approach to everything from planning to implementation can vastly improve returns on marketing investment.
Sounds good? Looking for guidance?
Keep reading to discover 7 strategic marketing habits to incorporate in your business.
1. Understanding the Point
There’s no room for guesswork in marketing.
Hoping for the best inevitably leads to disappointment. Never just throw things at the wall in the hope something will eventually stick.
Strategic marketing calls for an explicit reason behind a particular marketing endeavor.
You need to know:
Why your team has opted for one approach over another, and
Exactly what you’re trying to achieve.
Think about your current efforts, tactics, and campaigns. Do you have a solid understanding of why you’re doing them? No? Then it’s time to reassess the situation.
2. Getting Quantitative
Marketing decisions need to be justifiable too.
The best way to do it? With maths on your side!
Imagine having to defend every marketing decision you make to an overbearing boss. It’s far easier to justify a cost and budget when you have solid statistics and numbers to call upon.
You can look at past figures and forecast the potential return. Similarly, you can look at industry statistics and justify the need for investment in new products and services.
Taking a quantitative approach to marketing makes strategic sense. It’s a means of evidencing your decisions.
3. Planning and Goal Setting
Goal-setting and planning are constituent parts of any business success.
All marketing campaigns need a goal. Start by asking yourself what you’re trying to achieve. Do you want sales? Subscribers? Traffic? Brand-awareness? All of the above?
The specific goals for your campaign should align with those of the organization as a whole.
In effect, goals form the basis of the ‘why’ we mentioned in point number 1. They provide the point of your campaign. They also determine and justify where budgets and resources get allocated.
With the goal in place, you can turn to how you plan on achieving it. Look at how you’ll turn that goal into a reality.
4. Understanding Your Audience
All good marketing requires a solid understanding of your target customer.
You need in-depth insight into their demographics, needs, and desires. You need to know where they live, what they enjoy doing, and how they spend their time.
This immediately lends itself to more effective campaigns. It’s like preparing for a test and knowing the questions in advance. You already know what they want to see.
It becomes far easier to make decisions on marketing content, tone, and style.
Be honest with how well you truly know your audience. You may need to conduct research first in order to fill in gaps in your knowledge.
5. Staying on Top of Trends
Marketing has changed tremendously in recent years.
Successful marketers must stay on top of the latest trends in order to see success.
At the rate things are changing, that’s easier said than done! However, failure to do so can lead to valuable resources being wasted on outdated marketing efforts.
Being strategic means using the resources at your disposal in the most lucrative way possible. That requires a solid understanding of the techniques that work.
Want specific ideas? Video content, social media marketing, artificial intelligence, and optimizing for voice search are all areas to explore.
6. Researching and Analysis
Research and analysis are also of vital importance to marketing success.
It’s about knowing what your competitors are doing and understanding how you match up.
Consider performing a SWOT analysis. As you probably already know, this stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis. In essence, you look at your business in relation to the market.
Where are other marketers succeeding where you’re failing? Similarly, where are you succeeding where competitors are failing? What challenges do you face in the future?
These questions provide a solid understanding of the current state of affairs. You realize the areas you need to improve and challenges to overcome. Marketing efforts become honed in the process.
7. Testing and Measurement
Strategic marketing efforts are incomplete without regular testing and measurement.
They’re fundamental components of marketing success.
If you aren’t doing it, then you need to start! Remember the need to justify your decisions and leverage a quantitative approach? Well, testing feeds into both.
Strategic marketing calls for A/B testing at every turn.
It helps remove the guesswork from decision-making. The objective data that’s revealed can be used to optimize campaigns in line with evidence for what actually works.
Even the slightest change can make huge differences to key metrics, such as conversions.
For example, Bing estimated that the shade of blue chosen for their links could have generated them an extra $80 million. Imagine if they hadn’t tested that new shade of blue!
Time to Implement Strategic Marketing Habits
Marketing without a strategy is like shooting from the hip.
It’s far harder to hit your target. Resources of time and money get wasted.
Conversely, strategic marketing habits facilitate greater efficiency and effectiveness. They hone your efforts and deliver a considered, justified, and cohesive approach.
In a competitive world, that makes all the difference. After all, maximizing your marketing gains is key to success. Hopefully, this post has highlighted 7 key strategic habits to ensure the growth and prosperity of your business!
Are you looking for support with your marketing? We can help. Get in touch today to learn more.
