5 common mistakes when developing your marketing strategy
Do you know the 5 common mistakes when developing your marketing strategy?
Your marketing strategy is a crucial step in achieving your overall business objectives. It guides a business’s overall marketing efforts by understanding the customer’s needs and creating a distinct competitive advantage.
Here are 5 common mistakes entrepreneurs should avoid when developing their marketing strategies:
- Not defining your customer persona
- Not exploring the customer journey
- Failing to establish goals and objectives
- Managing your budget poorly
- Not making short-term and long-term investments
1- Not defining your customer persona
Running a business is exciting. Many entrepreneurs have a great idea and are eager to tell the world about it, but they often need a clear strategy to jump right into marketing. They try various tactics and channels until they become exhausted, and then they wonder why their efforts aren’t paying off. This can lead to frustration or even resentment towards marketing as a whole.
Does this sound familiar?
Often, the problem resides in an undefined customer persona.
A customer persona is a fictional character representing your target market’s ideal customer. Defining your persona is essential in understanding your customers’ behaviours and purchasing patterns.
Businesses could have one, two or even three personas, and it is crucial to delve deep into their needs, pain points and motivations for using your product or service.
Once you have a clear idea of your persona, you can develop a marketing strategy that speaks directly to them and resonates with their needs and values rather than a broad audience. By doing so, you’re more likely to succeed in getting your message across effectively, choosing the right channels and achieving your marketing goals.
It’s always possible to do a customer persona exercise, even if your business is mature, to start your next marketing strategy on the right foot.
2- Not exploring the customer journey
Defining your customer persona is the first step in developing your marketing strategy. The next crucial step is to walk through the customer journey. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs and marketing managers skip this step, but his exercise can reveal valuable information about your customers that can help you optimize your marketing efforts.
The customer journey maps your customer’s interactions with your brand and optimizes the customer experience.
A customer has a series of interactions with a brand from the moment they identify a need, associate it with a brand, and purchase and use the product or service. It also includes different customer touchpoints where you will meet your customers as they go through the stages.
Do you know why your customers choose you? Why did they choose your competitors? Does everyone on your team understand their role in the customer journey? How does your team create unique experiences for your customers?
These questions and more, are addressed through a comprehensive mapping of your customer journey and are vital when developing your marketing strategy.
3- Failing to establish goals and objectives
Successful strategy implementation requires clear objectives as much as it requires goals. With both present, a strategy is more likely to achieve success.
Entrepreneurs and marketing managers often launch strategies with only goals or objectives in place.
What is the difference between a goal and an objective?
- Goal: A statement you make about the future of your business. It represents your aspirations for it. For example, a goal could be: “We aim to be the most widespread provider of organic food in the country.” This statement shows that you have grand ambitions, but it needs to specify how to achieve them.
- Objective: The steps your company must take to reach its goals. They are often written using the SMART approach (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound). they are written without emotion. They are measurable and quantifiable. For example, an objective for the above goal could be: ‘’Increase our sales by 3% each quarter this year in every region where we currently operate.” Or “Open a new branch every quarter this year.”
As you can see, goals and objectives go hand in hand and keep your marketing strategy on track.
4- Managing your budget poorly
A budget is an essential component of your marketing strategy. It can be drafted annually, quarterly, or monthly and adjusted as needed.
It is crucial to manage your budget for each marketing channel effectively.
Once you have developed a well-defined persona and customer journey, selecting the proper marketing channels to reach your customers becomes more manageable. By setting SMART objectives for each channel, you can allocate your budget more effectively and ensure that your team and spending are aligned with your goals.
Remember you can always start small, hyper-focusing on one or two efforts and expanding your budget over time based on what works best.
5- Not making short-term and long-term investments
Investing in the right activities is critical for the success of your marketing strategy. Short-term investments that generate immediate sales are easy to justify, and stakeholders understand their importance.
However, the return on investment for medium or long-term marketing initiatives is only sometimes apparent. These include working on your value proposition, creating your marketing strategy, revisiting your brand image, redesigning your website, or organizing an event.
To ensure sound management practices, investing in short- and long-term marketing initiatives is essential.
When you have clear goals and objectives in place, the perceived risks of these investments decrease dramatically.
Developing a comprehensive marketing strategy gives a business clear direction, and the necessary investments for success are worthwhile.
In conclusion, Maïeutyk has been developing successful marketing strategies for small and medium-sized businesses for over a decade. To learn more about our services, please contact us. Or, take our short diagnostic survey to discover your needs and receive your results straight in your inbox.
Share
