Marketing Strategic Planning
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3 Reasons Why You Should Track Your Strategic Planning Process
Strategic marketing planning is a complicated yet necessary part of every business. Without a solid strategic marketing plan and strategy, you run the risk of increasing the costs of your marketing spending and losing sight of your objectives. Unfortunately, many businesses operate without a clear strategic plan outlining their marketing tactics’ direction and objectives. In a surprising report, OnStrategy found that 86% of business owners and marketing managers spend no more than one hour (or less) per month discussing their marketing strategies. Considering that many businesses fail due to a lack of direction, it’s crucial you avoid making mistakes by paying attention to your strategic planning process. Whether you’re a…
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3 Tips for Writing A Captivating Survey
Surveys are one of the best (and inexpensive) ways to gather data about your target customers. When done correctly, surveys can provide you with a broad set of useful data that allows you to move forward with your marketing objectives. Whether you want to know if your customers were satisfied with your services or find out the likelihood of them purchasing a product, surveys are able to supply you with what you need. Unfortunately, surveys are also vulnerable to non-response. This means respondents may not be too thrilled with providing you with answers. Some respondents may respond to a few questions, making the entire survey useless. Other respondents may refuse…
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How to Create Effective Market Research Questions
When it comes to market research, creating effective questions for customer interviews, focus groups, and other similar research formats can be challenging. As a marketer, you want to be able to ask the right questions that can garner the information that you want without overwhelming or misleading your interviewee. For instance, interview questions that encourage a particular response from your customers or try to undermine your competitors’ offerings can come off as disingenuous. These types of questions also prevent you from achieving your market research goals, which, in turn, halts your marketing efforts, whether it’s developing a strategy or helping a client launch a new product. So how do you…
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3 Tips for Writing a Good Executive Summary for Your Marketing Plan
As a marketer, you likely already know the importance of developing a marketing plan. A detailed marketing plan allows you to outline a game plan that can achieve key goals for the success and growth of a client’s brand (or yours). Most marketing plans provide marketers with a good sense of direction. For instance, you’ll be able to understand and follow through with each of your marketing activities, such as growing brand awareness, learning your target segments, and generating new leads. Most marketing plans start with an executive summary—and for good reason! An executive summary isn’t merely a brief introduction to a business’s overall marketing goals. It also introduces and…
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3 Important Metrics to Measure Your Content Marketing Efforts
After you’ve planned out and executed your content strategy, there’s one crucial step that needs to be performed next: analytics. Analytics is a marketing practice that you can’t ignore or skimp on. You need to understand how your content is performing to know what parts of your strategy are working (and what isn’t). In a recent report, SEMrush stated that 84% of businesses have a content marketing strategy, but only 11% evaluate their strategy as excellent. It’s not enough to create and execute a content strategy—you need to measure and understand its results as well. By tracking and analyzing your content’s performance, you’ll gain clear insights into your content’s efficiency, and adjust…
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3 Factors That Affect Budget Decisions in a Marketing Plan
Developing a marketing plan is no easy work. There’s lots of research and inquiries that must be addressed before any strategy is executed. Once you have collected all of your data, developed an effective strategy, and have chosen effective distribution channels, your work is not over. The next step is to consider your budget. That means taking out a pen and outlining how much each marketing effort in your strategy will cost. You will also need to combine your budget with a realistic timeline in which you will execute these efforts. This may sound like extra work but it’s worth investing your time. It’s also important to know the factors…
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5 Ways to Strengthen Your Brand Positioning in A Market
Branding is a word that’s commonly used in marketing circles. Like all marketing terms, branding is one of the most important concepts to learn and refine so that companies can establish a strong personality that their target consumers can identify with. Although branding is an essential part of marketing, there’s another term that’s equally as valuable: positioning. According to Chron, brand positioning involves claiming a position in a market or a reputation for a specific product, service, or company. In essence, it’s the way a brand stands out against its competition, which allows consumers to make informed decisions about different brands offering the same products or services. Some of the…
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How to Create a Strong SWOT Analysis For Strategic Planning
Behind every great business is a strong marketing strategy. Most marketers take the time to thoroughly research every aspect of their company, including history, social media presence, and even competition. After research is done, there’s one important element that must be performed: analysis of your findings. For most business strategies, one of the most respected tools to use is a SWOT analysis. You can think of it as in-depth examination of your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This internal and external evaluation of your business’s critical factors allows you to identify, revise, and sharpen your business strategy. Some of the ways you can build a strong SWOT analysis include:…
