Top Tips for planning your Marketing Strategy
Planning is the key to business success; it is so easy to be reactive and simply respond to clients as and when they come to us, but a reactive approach is never going to help your business grow.
To make the most of your business this year, set aside some crucial planning time for your marketing strategy. If you haven’t done this before it can be difficult to know where to start so here are our top tips to help you on your way.
1. Establish your business goals
Before you begin to plan your marketing strategy you need to establish your business goals. It is vital that you have targets to work towards otherwise you will not be able to allocate your time effectively. Make sure that you set individual budgets for each aspect of your business so that you know where you need to focus most of your time. Remember to take into consideration your peak seasons and your quieter times and set your targets accordingly.
2. Produce a PESTLE Analysis
A PESTLE analysis allows you to focus on six important factors that may affect your business over the coming months and put actions in to place to ensure minimum disruption to your company:
- Political - would the introduction of a new political party affect your business?
- Environmental - do you need to change any of your current processes to comply with government guidelines?
- Social - Facebook, Twitter and the rest, are you up to speed with Social Networking?
- Technology - is there any new technologies out there that may make your services redundant?
- Legal - minimum wage, retirement age, equal opportunities- would changes to any of these laws affect your staff?
- Economical - recession, increased petrol prices, VAT increase- how do these factors affect your business?
3. Produce a SWOT Analysis
A SWOT analysis is a really simple and effective way to analyse your business and should be done after a PESTLE analysis. Many business owners find it easy to recognise their strengths and to some degree their weaknesses, but make sure you put as much thought into the threats and opportunities facing your business too, did your PESTLE analysis flag any potential threats or opportunities to your business?
4. Recognise your competitors
Every business has competitors and it is really important to recognise who yours are. Once you have established who your competitors are you need to monitor their activity, find out their strengths and capitalise on their weaknesses. Your competitor may be cheaper than you are, but do they offer the same level of customer service that you do? You need to distinguish your businesses unique selling point and ensure that it is stronger than that of your competitor.
5. Recognise your most profitable customers and find more of the same!
Once you have been in business for a while you can become blind to who your customers are and what they actually want. Since you first set up shop you may have developed new products or introduced new services which may attract a completely new type of customer. You need to break your customer base down into segments, establish who your key customers are and those that are most profitable. Once you have done this you should then look to target more customers of the same calibre.
These tips are only a brief introduction to the detail that needs to be put in to planning your marketing strategy and hopefully they will give you a good head start. However if you are really serious about growing your business in 2010 why not take advantage of our one on one strategy sessions.
Led by the company directors these sessions can really help to drill down into your business and release those light bulb moments. To find out more about one on one strategy sessions please contact First Impression on 01457 857111 or email us.