Have you ever thought, why having a marketing strategy for the brand is important? Do you think smacking together a few ideas is a brand strategy? Then you are wrong. A good marketing strategy helps brands to identify the methods to promote their product and services to the right target audience. Creating an effective marketing strategy is the way to growth, expansion and success of the business.
Why should small business owners invest in a marketing strategy?
- A strategy helps you uncover the new findings of what people are looking for.
- A better understanding of your marketplace, your competitors, ongoing trends in the market, type of customers and make plans based on the needs and enquiries of your prospective audience.
- It helps plan out scope of improvement across your channels of focus.
- It gives you an ideal plan on how much you should invest and minimises the investment risk
The below images show the basic steps in a Market Research.
#Understand the client’s service – We deep dive into our client’s offerings and break it down into smaller segments of products or services. We then do a survey of the client’s web and social media presence.
#Understand the industry and the market – We try to understand our client’s industry, the customers of that industry, its marketplace requirements and the competitors. It helps us identify new opportunities for the brand and also identify any weaknesses or gaps, also seen as opportunity or scope of improvement.
#Understand the competitive landscape – We study how search engines (Google) and how social media platforms respond to keywords related to our client’s services and products. We use permutation combinations of it to uncover Results, Adscape, Offers, Listings and more.
Case Study:
Recently one of our clients approached us for a marketing strategy for her business. The client’s industry is that of Energy Healing and the client is based out of Delhi. They have a service as well as a product line. We invested time in doing a thorough understanding of the industry and the market to deliver a good outcome.
Here are some learnings that have been reaffirmed through our research:
Understanding each online channel independently contributes to creating a sharp strategy
Every channel has its benefits and limitations, accordingly each has its own set of preferred audience segments. It’s imperative to figure out which channel suits your customer set more.
A detailed online research of every platform in terms of profiles, content and groups needs to be conducted. Quora, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn, Twitter is good to start with.
It’s important to know what people are asking, searching for online
It is said the better you know your customer queries, hesitations, doubts, the better you can align your products or services to it. There are tools and channels at your disposal which can be used to uncover these queries. Keyword research tools & widgets, SEMRush’s Topic Research tool, manual research on a few sites like Quora and Reddit, helped us bucket queries together, brainstorm ideas and give a direction to our thoughts.
Your customers can belong to many other intersections
Every brand tries to understand the various interests of their customers, so they can meet them halfway, so the brand can cater to them in their language content wise. Intersection helps to identify the interests of the audience better. So we made use of available ‘audiences’ tools within Facebook and Google to dig more.
The customer will have similar interests, it’s just about finding that interest. In this case study for example, we found similar interests for the energy healing client, such as yoga, mental health, astrology, tarot, zodiac, sustainable living etc.
Investing in a well conducted audience survey is worth every penny
Conducting audience surveys with a well constructed questionnaire, with a good outreach plan brings about very useful and insightful results that can help a brand optimise its product line, broaden or focus its services too. We believe in a combination of qualitative and quantitative approach, so we often use questionnaires that we can send out digitally and in-depth, sometimes short interviews that unleashes a lot more insights on challenges, hiccups and more. Remember to pay attention to the audience you are targeting through the survey. It’s always good to use a combination of different backgrounds. It will help you MAP out the audiences’ interest vis a vis their responses.