What is marketing?
Marketing is the process and activity of creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging products and services that cultivate value for your clients and society.
—adapted from the American Marketing Association definition of marketing
Successful marketing is not solely about profit.
The return on investment, or ROI, from your marketing strategy also includes finding out whether you’ve served the clients you anticipated for the reasons you expected.
Crafting Your Marketing Strategy
We’ll begin the process of developing your marketing strategy by posing a set of questions designed to illuminate what is most important to you and your endeavor.
- What products and services will you offer?
- What are the trends and opportunities in your market?
- Who are your customers?
- What are your competitors?
- What is your overall value proposition?
As we plan your marketing strategy, it will soon include:
- an analysis of your customers, products, competition, and market potential
- a strategy for marketing segmentation, targeting, and positioning
- tactics to formalize the delivery of your products for maximum benefit, and
- measurement tools you can access and understand.
Your Marketing Campaign
From there, we’ll create a communications campaign based on your desired products, prices, placement, and promotions.
Depending on your needs as well as your budget, this may include the use of:
- email marketing
- social media
- a payment processor
- an online store
- digital/print promotions
- digital/print advertising
These are “behind the scenes” investments. You will use your own voice to engage your clients for the sake of authenticity and consistency. Everything else can be considered a form of marketing.
Bringing It Together
The output of planning your marketing strategy is the structured approach you’ll use to provide your products and services and measure your overall success. When followed, your marketing approach will cultivate the benefits you promise in your brand and provide you with a map and a calendar for carrying out your daily marketing activities.
As you might imagine, you’ll want to develop a visual identity and use it to convey the value of your endeavor. For this, you’ll need branding and a website with good design.
A final thought on marketing:
Good marketing is disciplined and it doesn’t cut corners in the process; it takes a lot of time and hard work, but in the end it’s worth it.
—Drew Boyd, Marketing Fundamentals and Inside the Box
