When it comes to building an impactful marketing strategy, it’s not about uncovering some specific “secret sauce.” Instead, it’s more about using a strategic process for hypothesizing and refining a marketing strategy over time. This article will help.
Do you need to improve your marketing strategy? Or maybe you even need to create the first marketing plan for your business. According to a study by Outbound Engine, about 50% of small businesses are operating without a defined marketing plan.
You can start by asking yourself this list of marketing strategy questions about your current marketing strategy, which will help you improve it.
Here are 11 marketing strategy questions to ask yourself before building your strategy.
Marketing Strategy Questions Before Building Yours
1. What is your client buying from you? What motivates your customers to buy your solution? Do you sell through fear, aspirations, or solving a specific problem? Does your approach still work in the current business landscape?
People buy health insurance based on fear of a negative because they essentially buy “peace of mind.”
People buy Tony Robbins books for inspiration to pursue positive change. They are buying a sense of optimism and possibility (and some action items).
You go to a mechanic when your car breaks down because it solves your problem (you need to be able to drive your car to work, and you can’t). The main thing you care about is your car’s working, not the name of the tools used to fix it.
So what are you selling? What motivates people to buy? Has this been changing, and do you need to update your approach?
2. How has your product or service evolved over the past year? Is your marketing message still aligned? Does it need to evolve to keep in sync?
Most businesses’ products and services constantly evolve as they strive for continuous improvement. It’s important to regularly assess these changes and ensure your marketing messaging still aligns with the current form of the product or service. For example, if you are working to establish the product as high-end, you might start talking about it as “premium.”
3. What is your pipeline for getting people to meet, know, like, and trust you?
Nowadays, consumers expect more handholding from their providers. Create a clear pipeline for prospects to be introduced to you and get to know and like you over time.
For example, that might involve:
Social media post -> PDF lead magnet -> autoresponder campaign -> webinar -> sales call
4. Does your target market like a style of content you currently don’t provide, such as webinars or YouTube videos?
Maybe your target customers love podcasts, so all your potential customers are getting poached by others providing podcasts in your space. Scout out the type of content the VIPs in your target market are consuming, and start producing it for them.
5. Where can you find your target market on social media, such as LinkedIn or Facebook? Are they still easily reachable in the same places?
This is a variation on the “Who is your ideal customer, and where do they hang out“question. The nature of social media and online communities is that they are constantly shifting landscapes. Are your ideal customers still easily reached in the same types of places? Or have they been shifting to new places where you should explore marketing?
24% of businesses don’t use social media at all! So there’s about a 1 in 4 chance this channel is an unexplored opportunity for your business.
6. Are people still reading your blog?
Chances are you have a blog. Chances are also good that it either works well for you or not. When updating your marketing strategy, you can regularly review whether something is working for you or not when it comes to your marketing. A blog is a great place to start for this.
Note: If your blog isn’t getting good results, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should immediately drop it. But it does mean that you either need to drop it or plan an update to your blogging approach to get it to work better.
7. What are your intended CTA’s (call to action) during the stages of your pipeline? Are these naturally from how people view your emails and website?
Review every part of your marketing and website and ask yourself, ” What am I trying to get people to do here?“Each should have a clear call to action in a sensible place. This includes things like the links in your emails and the button on your homepage, which may direct people to the pricing page or the book-a-call page.
8. Do you have analytics to show where people click on your emails and your website? Where does it show them clicking, and is this aligned with the intended CTA?
This one’s easy – do you have a tracking tool for your emails and website to track clicks? If not, add it. Down the road a bit when you are sitting down to make a strategic decision about your marketing direction, you’ll have valuable data to help you make informed decisions. For example, when you try to figure out why an email campaign promoting a product isn’t working, you need to be able to see who clicks on the email versus the webpage to troubleshoot whether people are not clicking on the link in the email or whether they are clicking the email but not clicking on the landing page.
9. What are your customer retention strategies, and how are you implementing them?
The easiest and cheapest way to get more business is to do more business with your current customers. What’s your strategy for approaching customer retention? Do you have a specific way to encourage this? Often there can be some extremely low-hanging fruit in this area.
10. How many referrals do you get? What does your strategy/pipeline look like for consistently getting new referrals?
According to a study conducted by The New York Times, 65 percent of companies’ new business comes from referrals.
Yet, similarly to the previous point on retention strategies, you probably already get loads of referrals…or very few at all. In either situation, most businesses don’t have a clear strategy for consistently getting referrals. Take the time to sit down and consider the referrals you get, the mechanism for how you currently get them, and how you can set up a reliable system for regularly soliciting new referrals for your business.
11. What primary metrics can tell you whether you’re succeeding or failing? Do you have a defined success metric for every marketing campaign you implement? How do you optimize your results over time?
Over 80% of small business owners in the Annual Staples National Small Business Survey said they don’t track their business goals. Let’s fix that.
First, it’s important to have a reliable method for establishing measurable targets and monitoring progress toward them. This might include a daily KPI scorecard for your team, a weekly review meeting, or a quarterly planning session with your leadership team.
There’s one additional necessary component, too. There needs to be a clear process for running tests and optimizing based on what works. Without this, you are setting yourself up for failure to hit your targets.
You can think about it like walking through hills and mountains to find the highest peak. You are currently at the line, and as you try to get to the top of the highest peak, you must first take some detours, which go lower and lower, before getting to the highest point.
These experiments have varying results (different altitudes), but the process is essential for ultimately finding your way to the highest peak.
Create a process for running experiments as you pursue your success metrics and for regularly reviewing the results to see if you need to keep going and build off the experiment you ran or if it was the wrong way. You should turn back onto a different path to pursue the peak.
Conclusion
Answering these marketing strategy questions is only the first step of many for improving your marketing strategy. Going through this exercise, you’ll have identified many things you must do first to get the ball rolling.
What was your biggest takeaway so far?
If you’d like to read more about sales strategy and remote selling, check out our article on consultative sales processes and the Challenger Sales approach.
Please read our article on email marketing strategies to try in 2024 for more ideas on improving your marketing.
