How To Create A Marketing Strategy That Works
Are you an African founder who wonders, “how do I market my product/service?”. That question could give you sleepless nights, nights when you brainstorm several different ideas on your own. Should you do blogposts, run ads, create videos, create courses or something else entirely? Sometimes, you ask people what to do, but it seems the answers aren’t as straightforward as expected. You only seem to get more ideas and little, if any, direction. If this is you, then you are not alone. Several other founders across the continent feel the same way you feel. To help you do away with this feeling and answer those burning questions, you simply need to devise a marketing strategy and a marketing plan.
What is a marketing strategy?
A marketing strategy is a document shaped by your business strategy. It must align with your business goals and the overall purpose of your business.
What is a marketing plan?
A marketing plan, on the other hand, is a detailed sequence of activities. The details involve what marketing activities will be carried, how they will be carried out and where they will be carried out. To wrap it all up, it includes success metrics — key milestones you will reach to signify that you have truly made progress.
Think of a marketing strategy and a marketing plan this way: when going to war, you know several battles will be fought. The goal of the war is to come out victorious (that is similar to a strategy). How the war will be won is determined by the tactics employed in each battle. Those tactics are the marketing plan.
There are several ways to create each of these two documents. In the rest of this article, we will discuss creating a marketing strategy document that can be adapted to suit your business needs. Here are a few things to note while creating a marketing strategy document.
- Start with the goal in mind
When creating a marketing strategy document, you do not want to include every detail about your entire business, neither do you want to deviate from the goals of your business. Keep your business goals in mind, ensuring that they are as SMART as possible.
An example of a goal for a startup could be to reach a specific amount in revenue/profit by a specific date. Another example is that a startup could want to expand to by x customers who execute transactions worth x over the course of x months.
When setting your goals, make sure to take possible challenges into consideration. In Africa, these challenges could come in the form of legislation and regulation, bureaucracy, and even unpredictable weather conditions. Factor all the relevant challenges into your goal-setting process, along with plans of action to help you tackle these challenges when they arise.
2. Carry out market research
This involves a thorough understanding of the problem you are solving and the value you have. After this, you then begin to discover who is willing to pay for that value you offer. Understanding the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that surround your business is a major advantage at this point as it provides a unique approach to your eventual marketing campaigns.
At the end of this step, you should have a thorough knowledge of the market size (number of potential customers) and market segments (potential customers divided according to demographics, geographic location, lifestyle patterns, and the amount they can spend on your offering).
3. Understand your target customers
Here, you do a deep dive into who your target customers are. You could create an ideal user at this point to put certain things into proper perspective. Ont thing to take note of at this point is that, for certain products/services, the target customer is not the eventual user. For instance, for anything related to babies (nappies, food, clothing, baby care products), the user is the baby, but the customer is the parent who buys baby products (in most African homes, that is the mother).
Your understanding of the ideal customer should include the customer’s likes, dislikes, goals and aspirations, pain points, and why they need your products.
4. Understand your competitors.
At every point, your potential customer either already has someone producing something similar to what you produce, or something already solves the problem they have. Depending on what you offer, your competition might be direct or indirect competition. For instance, fast-food companies are in direct competition with each other but in indirect competition with high-end restaurants and restaurants that serve local cuisine. Athletic footwear brands compete directly with each other but are indirectly in competition with business shoe brands.
Understand who your competitors (direct and indirect) are and where they stand, along with their current product offerings. This will help you decide how best to position your own offering to secure your target customers.
5. Craft your message
At this point, you are ready to begin crafting your message. Determine the core belief that your potential customers have about you and your offering. Provide evidence to support the claims you make about your offering.
Don’t forget to select the best channels to reach your audience. Your competition is probably already using the same channels, so ensure your message is more attention-worthy than theirs.
As time goes on, you will get better at crafting your marketing strategy document. Remember to keep testing your ideas, recording results, and making little adjustments to make your campaigns better. In our next post, we will highlight the key steps to creating a marketing plan.
