2023 is quickly sneaking up on you, meaning it’s time for you to start creating your new marketing goals and strategy for the new year.
Now, your first question may be, what exactly is a marketing strategy? A marketing strategy is a detailed plan of a business's promotional efforts across a wide range of platforms and channels which aims to increase sales and achieve a competitive advantage in the market.
This may sound scary, but don’t worry, we’re here to help you! Keep reading for our top tips to get you started on your 2023 marketing plan.
1. The Marketing Mix
The marketing mix, more commonly known as the 7 p’ of marketing, is the combination of products, pricing, places, promotions, people, processes and physical evidence a business uses to differentiate itself from their competition.
Product - What are you selling?
Price - What is the price?
Place- Where will you be selling the product?
Promotion - Where will you be promoting the product?
People - Those who are directly or indirectly involved with your target clients
Process – How you will deliver the product to clients and provide them with the best experience possible?
Physical Evidence - tangible goods and experiences that convince clients that your product is genuine
Once you have each ‘P’ planned out, you can then turn this into a structured and detailed plan for each promotional channel.
2. Create Your SMART Goals
SMART goals aim to guide you in the setting of goals and objectives that are thought to help your business gain better results. You can align these with your 7 P’s or create them right after, no matter what you do, your goals should be planned out before your strategy is created. Your 2023 goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. For example, setting a goal such as ‘gain more Instagram followers’ isn’t very clear, but setting goals such as ‘increase Instagram following by 50% by the end of the year’ is much clearer on what you want to achieve.
3. Set Your Marketing Budget
Your marketing budget and Return on Investment go side by side, your budget helps you to determine how much money you have to spend and what on. Without having the right funds for your software, advertising and staff, your marketing strategy won’t make a powerful impact. Winging your finances can be very risky and you want to avoid doing that, remember you can start small and when you see your ROI you can build on them.
4. Take a Look at Your Current and Target Audience
As your business grows your target audience will change with it, so you need to consider if it has stayed the same or started to change recently.
Has your audience become more local or more national? Have their interests changed? What’s the best way to communicate with them?
You need to decide if you're going to focus more on customer retention or customer acquisition because this will massively impact some areas of your marketing strategy,
5. Don't Forget Competitor Analysis
You need to know your competitors before you start your marketing plan, understanding their strengths and weaknesses compared to yours can help you find a gap in the market and draw the attention of your target audience from them to you. You may already know who you main competitors are, but it’s key to research them nonetheless as you may find a surprise competitor you didn’t know you had. Some questions to ask yourself are:
What service are they providing?
Are you targeting similar target audiences?
Are they operating closing to you?
Creating a complete marketing strategy isn't something that’s going to happen overnight. Stick with it (and use some of the tips we've included in this post) and over time you'll have a marketing strategy which ensures your spending most of your time focusing on the channels your audience cares most about.