A marketing strategy refers to the methods you implement to promote your products and services to your target audience. It can include website content, television and radio advertising, and content launched on social media platforms. Developing an effective marketing strategy for your business is the key to growth, expansion, and long-term success. The challenge, however, is that developing the right marketing strategy can involve a lot of hit or miss, and for small businesses, the costs related to misunderstanding your market can be catastrophic.
Advantage: Promotes Your Business to a Target Audience
You can’t sell your products or services without appealing to the people most likely to buy those products and services. That group is known as your target audience, and a marketing strategy is the most effective way to reach that all-important group. If you have targeted this group correctly, you know their habits, behaviors, wants, and needs, and you also know where they like to hang out on social media. This information shapes the methods you will use to promote your business. For example, if you own a comic book store, online marketing can be more beneficial than traditional advertising to help you reach your audience on social media platforms.
Advantage: Helps You Understand Your Customers
You have to do market research before you develop a marketing strategy, and that research can provide you with reams of data that you can use over and over to help refine your product development and to keep up with trends and shifts in your target audience’s behavior. With the evolution of digital information, even small businesses have access to hyper-detailed information about prospective customers. This is known in the digital world as “big data,” large data sets that give you a deep analysis into customer behavior based on factors such as online activity, buying activity, mobile activity, and interactions at stores and shops.
Advantage: Helps Brand Your Business
Your marketing strategy isn’t just about boosting leads and converting them into buyers, it’s also about expressing the culture, values, and purpose of your business. The process of communicating that vision to your audience is the essence of branding. For example, Apple’s marketing strategy is all about simplicity, elegance, design, and function. Their products are sleek, simple, beautiful, and offer multiple functionalities. When people think of Apple, they think of a company whose products are always on the cutting-edge of technology, design, and physical attractiveness.
Disadvantage: Costs of Marketing
Although the digital revolution has somewhat evened the playing field, the truth is that small business is still at a disadvantage, when it comes to grabbing their share of eyeballs through their marketing efforts. Big data has great value, but accessing that data is expensive, and you have to keep analyzing that data to stay abreast of buyer trends. Launching a marketing campaign on your website can also be expensive, especially if you’re using a pay-per-click strategy to attract more prospects. Television and radio advertising spots are also costly, and even local advertising space is at a premium, because there is so much competition for the local audience.
Disadvantage: Time and Effort May Not Yield a Return
Big brands can afford to spend time and effort working on a marketing campaign that fails, because they have the resources to regroup and move on. As a small business owner, however, the return on investment on a marketing campaign may be low, and that means you have spent months crafting a strategy that did nothing to help your bottom line. Even the most well-planned marketing campaigns fail, and at the small business level, that can set you back for months.
