Marketing Strategy: An introduction for start-ups and small businesses.
10 elements all businesses must consider for a successful marketing strategy.
Organisations are always looking for ways to increase sales or attract more customers, and many believe it’s enough to just focus on promotions and advertising. However, without a clear marketing strategy – your budget and resources will be wasted, and your marketing tactics will underperform.
We’ve listed 10 fundamental elements of marketing strategy to focus on for your business.
Arboreal Marketing Ltd are experts in business-to-business marketing strategy, why not contact us and find out how we can build and implement a marketing strategy for your business?
1. WHY are you in business?
You will attract more customers and advocates to your business if your values, mission and purpose match with their needs. Simply saying “we are in business to make money” is not enough, revenue and profit is a result of what your organisation does, not why you do it.
You need to look at what the essence of your offering is, and then find a way to communicate this with your market in the simplest way possible.
The paradigm example of this in action was laid out by Simon Sinek in his theory of The Golden Circle. The central tenet of The Golden Circle is that your organisation should be able to show the world “WHY anyone should care about the work you do”. This is just as important in B2B marketing as it is in B2C marketing – with ESG a higher priority than ever before, being able to share your business ethos has become essential.
What makes you unique?
Look at your competition, your current customer base and your service or product offering and then ask yourself what makes you unique? Once you have that USP – protect it, as your success will encourage your competitors to challenge that unique position.
Case Study:
The WHY in practice:
SLACK - Click here for Slack’s mission statement
Slack is a B2B SaaS platform empowering teams to collaborate and communicate easily together, wherever they are. Slack has grown year on year by as much as 40% over the last few years in a marketplace filled with competitor offerings.
Slack’s mission statement is clear “Make work life simpler, more pleasant and more productive”. So what makes this a great WHY?
It’s short, clear and simple – no fluff, no long sermons and easy to understand.
It’s embodied in everything they do – from the product build all the way through to staff training and their website.
It resonates with their customer base – it matches trends and fits with the need for pulling together remote teams.
2. How well do you know your industry segment?
The more you know about your customers, the more likely you are to create great marketing that resonates with them and drives new and repeat business. To do this your teams will need to gather data on your industry and then segment the market into different potential customer groups with similar needs (see the diagram below).
Your marketing resources are finite and if you try to create marketing aimed at appealing to everyone, you will find you appeal to no-one. So, segment your potential customer base and ensure you can place data against each group that will show profitability potential.
Resources:
Survey Sparrow have a solid article on segmentation with examples of different aspects of segmentation.
Contact us if you need support in segmenting your customer base.
3. Be clear about which customers you’re targeting and why.
Not all potential segments are profitable, and your business won’t resonate as naturally with some segments as with others. So, make sure you are clear about which segments you are targeting and why they are your primary choices. There are a few reasons why you may target a segment over others including:
Profitability – is that segment willing to pay you a premium or purchase commodities at a high enough volume?
Competition – is this a segment light on competition, and therefore less pressure on price?
Product/service fit – does this segment have an essential requirement for your services or products compared to other segments?
Segments targeted should be those your business can excel within and should offer a substantial return on investment.
Once the key customer segments have been identified, then they should be categorised in terms of potential sales or profit. This will help your sales and marketing teams focus their time and budget on the customers that will deliver the greatest return.
4. Set clear marketing objectives that will deliver a profit.
Your marketing budget is precious and susceptible to waste. By working to a few, simple, clear marketing objectives – you will clearly see what works and is delivering additional sales.
A maximum of three SMART objectives for your marketing strategy will be easy to manage and evaluate. The objectives must clearly relate back to the organisational objectives and company vision too. Set KPIs against each objective and make sure the impact on growth is clear for everyone. When building objectives into your strategy, work bottom up. Involve the teams this will impact and look at stretch targets that are incentivising rather than unattainable.
Also – while mentioning incentives, bonus your marketing teams! They will have as much impact on your sales growth over 12 months as the sales team will. Ensure they share your business’s success in the same way.
5. Create a clear message that resonates with your target segment.
You’ve identified why you’re in business, you’ve agreed on your key target customer segment, and you’ve built your objectives. So now you need to communicate to your segment why you’re their best choice and they should work with you.
A single clear message that connects your customers to your organisation can then form the foundation of all your content marketing, website messaging, PPC and SEO. This will be reflected throughout your social media marketing, brochure work and email marketing through.
This is your positioning statement and should embody the following:
Why you’re organisation exists.
How you meet the need of your chosen customer segment (what’s their struggle).
How you differ from the competition (you’re USP).
What you promise as a brand.
Who you are.
Your message can be tweaked if you have more that on segment, and also tailored to your A customers compared to your lower tiered customer categories.
Example positioning statements from B2B brands:
Hubspot
"Since 2006, HubSpot has been on a mission to make the world more inbound. Today, over 100,000 customers in more than 120 countries use HubSpot's award-winning software, services, and support to transform the way they attract, engage, and delight customers. Composed of HubSpot's CRM, Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub, and Operations Hub, HubSpot gives companies the tools they need to grow better."
Hubspot are one of the most successful CRM brands currently available, their positioning statement lays out why it’s in business, it’s size and authority, why it’s unique and what it does.
Mailchimp
“Mailchimp is an all-in-one Marketing Platform for small business. We empower millions of customers around the world to start and grow their businesses with our smart marketing technology, award-winning support, and inspiring content.”
Mailchimp, owned by Intuit, is one of the world’s largest email platforms, their statement clearly positions the brand at startups and then reinforces with the brand’s strengths.
Slack
“Slack is the collaboration hub that brings the right people, information, and tools together to get work done. From Fortune 100 companies to corner markets, millions of people around the world use Slack to connect their teams, unify their systems, and drive their business forward.”
Slack again! Here you can see how they took the WHY and incorporated it into their positioning statement.
6. Create a marketing plan for the next 12 months.
And make sure everyone knows about it, sales, finance, logistics – they all need to be involved in building the plan and they need regular inputs to let you know of any changes through the year.
PR Smith’s SOSTAC framework for marketing planning is an excellent tool to pull together and easily communicate your marketing plan with your organisation. Adaptive but comprehensive without being cumbersome your plan should include:
Situation Analysis – where your organisation is right now
Objective – Where the organisation wants to get to
Strategy – How the organisation gets there, the big picture
Tactics – How the organisation gets there, the details
Action – who does what and when
Control – Resource allocation and evaluations
7. Hire experts and let them use their expertise.
Marketers train and gain experience to become experts in their discipline. It’s also the department that suffers from outside “experts” imposing themselves on the creation of assets. So give the marketing team a clear objective and mission, then let them get to work.
In the meantime:
Defend them from the hundreds of outside opinions that will land as they create your brand.
Act as a filter for your organisation, taking the key inputs from each department and feeding them into the marketing team.
Listen to their feedback on customer behaviour and trends, the marketing team is the bridge between the organisation and your customers. They translate what the business offers into something the customer wants.
If you’re organisation is not yet ready to employ full time FTEs in marketing then we would love to support you while the business grows.
8. Be clear about the marketing budget and then empower.
Often, marketing budgets are set too low at the beginning of the year and are seen as cost centres that can be cut when it looks like objectives aren’t going to be reached. When a market becomes more competitive, it is the businesses who shout the loudest and with the strongest message that continue to grow.
If you change the mindset of a marketing budget from cost centre to sales generator, you will be less inclined to cut it. And once it’s in place, trust that the marketing team will know how to assign it. If you have clear objectives and the strategy is focussed on delivering the objectives. Then the budget will be allocated appropriately according to impact.
9. Digital marketing isn’t everything.
Choose the marketing tools to suit the way your consumers digest media rather than choosing tools you think are in vogue. There is still a place for effective traditional marketing techniques such as direct mail or billboards. In fact, the return of these tactics has increased since they have been effectively blended with landing pages and QR codes. This hybrid way of marketing cuts through the noise of email marketing (which has become harder to penetrate) as we only receive around 4 pieces of mail per week compared to around 180 emails per day!
If the mix of tools you use for your marketing is coordinated in the right way, your face to face, offline and online marketing should seamlessly blend across one unified strategy. The trick is to find the communications that work for your audience.
10. Data, Data, Data
The old carpentry adage is “measure twice, cut once” and this is true for marketing. We have data for everything at our fingertips, whether that’s search engine performance, web performance through GA4 or social media and emails – it’s now easier than ever to find out which tools perform, and which need to have their investment pulled.
Beware of analysis paralysis, ensure any marketing data is giving you the insight to see if you’re meeting your objectives. But make sure someone in your team understands how to read and manipulate Google Analytics data, use an SEO ranking platform, and can interpret your social media engagement.
If you don’t have that person then hire one in – Arboreal Marketing Limited have Google Analytics 4 certified experts who can help you configure your dashboards to show you the insights you need at the click of a button.
Marketing strategy isn’t easy – but is essential.
These 10 areas are just the tip of the iceberg for in depth performance marketing. If you follow the tips above, your marketing will improve dramatically and as a result so will your sales.
Arboreal Marketing are here to provide comprehensive support across all areas of marketing. We can help you build a marketing department or improve your existing marketing processes. We work in partnership with you to implement common sense marketing strategies that will deliver increased leads, more customers and a greater retention from your current customer base. Contact us and book and appointment today.