If You Don’t Have a “Marketing Strategy”, You Need to Read This

Do you know what people think about your product, how they use it, why they buy it, and what problems they have with your industry?

If you don’t, then how can you expect to successfully sell them on your product?

You’re going to learn an easy to apply process for creating a marketing strategy in this article.

But first, what is a marketing strategy anyway?

A marketing strategy is simply the term for the process of thinking through how you’re going to communicate about your product.

You’re going to learn a method for creating a highly effective strategy that comes from the needs of your customers.

Why Do You Market The Way You Do Today?

In many businesses, the reason that your marketing budget is what it is, or why you do certain marketing activities over others is due to precedent.

You do things the way you do mainly because that’s how they’ve been done.

Originally, marketing was just supposed to be a more disciplined way of thinking about sales. Sales-focused marketing deals with understanding customer needs, and learning how to overcome objections.

Sales-focused marketing was about getting information from the salespeople on the front lines and incorporating that feedback into a system.

Marketing decisions are made a little bit differently in business today.

Over the years marketing has increasingly grown to focus on financial analysis, usually incorporating tools from microeconomics like marginal analysis and forecasting.

Instead of using the feedback from salespeople to make marketing decisions, today’s decisions more often looks like this:

“Here’s what we manufacture. Here are the sales and profit goals we’ve set. Now, let’s go out and find some customers who can help us make our goals.”

Many managers today seem to think that customers come because of marketing efforts to draw them in, rather than because their product provides the consumer value.

Instead of starting with the customer and working back, many businesses today start with a dollar or volume goal.

How much money should be allocated for marketing? Instead of starting with the consumer’s wants and needs, that number is reverse engineered from the dollar goal, costs, and margin.

This budget is allocated to different channels based off of what’s always been done, instead of what makes sense for the customers.

This is marketing done “inside-out”. Planning that’s done based off of financial analysis, sales, marketing, and profit goals set based only off of the company’s needs.

What’s the problem with “inside-out” marketing strategies?

You wind up with an end result that is not relevant to the customers.

What You’ll Learn to Do Better

You can make sure that all of your marketing is always relevant to the customer by starting with them first.

The method you’re about to learn for creating a marketing strategy uses “outside-in” planning.

Instead of starting with you, you’re going to have to start with the most important person — the customer.

Define your prospects.

Understand their pain.

What are their wants or needs?

Then, match your products to their needs.

When you’re trying to communicate with people who want and need your product, marketing is really more of a question of getting the message to them — rather than trying to draw them in with tricks like price cuts.

Let’s dive into the method for creating a successful, customer first marketing strategy.

The Customer

Obviously the most important part of creating a customer first approach to marketing is going to be starting with the customer.

Who are they? What are they about?

Last week we dove real deep into what information you should try to find out about your prospect, and how to find it.

That demographic information is only one part of this section of this portion of the strategy.

In this section of the marketing strategy, you’re trying to incorporate what you know about your prospect’s psychology and marry it with what you know about how they’re using your product (or products like yours).

6 Questions to Ask About Your Prospects

1. How does this group perceive products in your category?
2. What do they buy now? Where do they buy it? How do they use the products?
3. How does this group find information about products in your category? (From a trusted authority? Word of mouth? In a publication? Traditional Media? Online? Social media? Advertisements, where? Other?)
4. How does this group look for information about their problem? (Podcast? Blogs? Websites? From friends? From a trusted authority like a doctor? Word of mouth? Other?)
5. Lifestyles and psychographics like we discussed last week (Job title, demographic information, consumer tastes)
6. What does the group want from the product category that they are not now getting?

After answering these questions, you’re going to want to use the information to generate something called a target buying incentive statement. It’s supposed to be one sentence that summarizes why customers would buy from you over your competition.

It looks like this:

“I (the customer) will buy a product that _________ than any other product in the category.”

Don’t worry if it sounds a little clunky to you. This sentence is never meant to go in any marketing, it only serves as a compass to point your marketing campaigns in the right direction.

The Product

In this section of your marketing strategy you’re going to become a mad scientist and autopsy your product to really dig into what makes it tick.

1. The nitty-gritty of your product: What’s in it? How is it different? How is the product made? Who invented it? Why? How? How does it actually work? Why does it work? Any other information you feel is relevant, and hasn’t been covered yet.
2. How does the consumer perceive the product? (How does it look, feel, taste, etc?)
3. How does the consumer perceive the company behind the product? (That’s you!)

The Competition

Look, some people spend way too much time worrying about what their competition is doing.

That’s not good for you. Or productive.

This portion of the research isn’t about spying on them or stealing from them.

It’s about understanding how you fit into the broader conversation around your topic.

You want to get a good idea of what your competition is saying to your consumers, how you’ll address their points in your marketing (if at all, but sometimes you can find weakness in their supposed strengths), and how you’ll differentiate yourself in the market.

You find a niche for your business by finding the “hole” in the conversation, and filling it.

The ONLY 5 Questions About Your Competition You Need to Worry About

1. Who are your competitors? Why? (Think of direct and indirect competitors)
2. What do the competitors now communicate to the consumer?
3. How are the competitors perceived by the consumer?
4. How will the competition retaliate against your program?
5. How vulnerable is the competition? From whom will we take business?

The Angle

Okay so you have all of these fun details about your product written down… Now what?

People don’t just buy “longer lasting”, they buy a benefit.

What’s the difference between a benefit and a product feature?

Nobody buys quick sprouting seeds, they buy a lush green lawn.

I have a comprehensive guide to creating benefits here if you want more detailed instructions.

You’ll have to figure out what the “angle” is for your brand by deciding what competitive benefit you’re going to hang your hat on.

A competitive benefit means that it’s unique to your brand. It helps you stand apart from the other offerings in your category.

4 Questions to Discover Your Competitive Benefit

1. What is the main pain point you’re trying to solve?
2. How does your competition address the pain?
3. How does your product address the pain?
4. How will the customer believe your competitive benefit? (Brainstorm what types of proof you have available)

The Personality

It’s not just the benefits that sells a product, it’s also you!

Every business is different because of the unique energy you bring to the table. Even if there are 100 competitors in your category across the country, there’s only one you.

There’s only one person who will possibly execute your idea just like you.

I’m going to show you a trick to help you distill you down to a simple essence you can use to guide your marketing.

Imagine that your brand is a person. And this person is at a cocktail party.

Another party goer walks up to your brand and says “So, tell me a little bit about yourself!”

Imagine 3–5 adjectives “your brand” would use to describe themselves, and write them down.

For my blog, I’d say 3 could be chatty, friendly, and helpful.

Maybe you want to be cool, funny, and rebellious!

This exercise is so deceptively simple that it seems a little dumb, but play around with these adjectives until you have a combination that resonates with you.

You’ll be able to use this cluster of words to guide the tone of your marketing communications from now on!

When marketers talk about something being “on brand”, this is it.

This adjective exercise is almost like the communications equivalent of creating a brand style guide.

The Goal

What’s the point of deploying marketing if you don’t want any particular outcome?

You should never make marketing just for marketing’s sake.

You may incorrectly think that some marketing is better than no marketing, but that’s a myth.

Actually, bad marketing creates worse results than no marketing at all.

3 Questions So You’ll NEVER GO WITHOUT A GOAL AGAIN

1. What main point about your product do you want the consumer to take away from the communication?
2. What action do you want the consumer to take as a result of the communication? (Try product? Send for more information? Use product more often? Other?)
3. If my marketing communication is successful, (# months/years) from now the consumer will perceive my product as _____ compared to the competition.

The Point of Contact

Should your ad go on TV? Radio? Print? As direct mail?

Should you do online marketing?

What kind?

Facebook? Twitter? Pinterest? Videos or text?

How are you making these decisions right now?

If it’s based off of what you just feel like doing, then that’s the wrong answer.

The best part about this marketing strategy approach you’re learning is that it will lead you to some new out of the box answers to these questions.

Because you’re starting with the customer first, instead of focusing on what you want, you’re probably going to come to different conclusions than you would before. You may discover new advertising opportunities that are more relevant to your customer than you would have otherwise.

2 Questions to Find the Best Contact Points

1. When is the consumer most receptive to selling messages? When do they experience their pain, in what situations?
2. To most effectively reach the consumer with a believable, persuasive message, the following consumer contact points should be considered: (List them) Why? (Your justification for selecting the points of contact)

If you enjoyed reading, please spread the word by hitting the ❤ button! I’d also love it if you shared this article with a friend via email, Facebook, or Twitter.