The benefits of a professional consultant
The secret sauce to whether or not a business marketing strategy is effective is in deciding what to do and how to do it. The resources, time, and finances you spend in creating a business marketing plan will come back to you many times over in dollars earned and failures avoided.
Creating an effective analysis
A business marketing strategy or business plan begins with a marketing analysis. Matter of fact, it’s the motivation behind doing a marketing strategy. Whether you’re a new business or an existing business, your digital marketing analysis should be examined and renewed on a yearly basis as markets and trends change.
Furthermore, you need to create a unique plan based on your organization. All businesses are different–and what works for your competitor may not work for you. What works for your ice cream shop, will not work for your consulting firm.
A business marketing analysis can help make projections based on facts and data rather than assumptions. If you can conduct good marketing analysis, you will be clear on what’s next for your business.
Successful organizations start with a business marketing analysis. Large organizations have plans that include hundreds of pages and small organizations can get away with only having a handful of data.
An analysis should include an assessment of your desired market, focusing on market size (volume and value), customer segments, business projection, regulations, target market, competition, economics, and barriers of entry.
A business marketing analysis is generated based on feedback from many people and resources. Feedback should be from: finance, personnel, supply, tech support, sales, etc. Feedback is crucial in making sure a marketing analysis is successful.
A marketing analysis should demonstrate the attractiveness of the market from a financial standpoint. Considering trends change, employees leave, and because customers come and go, a marketing analysis should cover at least 1 year and a maximum of 2-4 years.
What to know
When analyzing your market, you should focus on where you desire your organization to be. Focus on the people that you haven’t reached and create a strategy to reach them. If your business is only reaching one demographic but should be reaching multiple, then your analysis should explain why. For example; if you sell a physical product that can be used by both male and female, all ethnicities, and can be used for all ages, but you are only selling to one race, one gender, and one age group, then you are missing something. Don’t settle with those results and embrace your current audience. Work to build a business marketing analysis to help you understand how to reach the untapped potential of your organization.
Every market has its trends. It’s crucial for knowing which trends are in and which are out. For instance, if you’re selling a TV, you need to know if customers care more about the look, size, or picture quality. The answer to this question is critical and every business plan has a unique answer to their specific market.Market Need
This is very important to include within your business marketing analysis. You must understand why your current customers purchase, and why new customers will purchase based on your analysis. Getting a product in front of a customer, while complex, is not the end of the sale. They need to purchase. After the purchase, they need to refer a friend and repeat their purchase again in the future. From a tactical perspective, this is where you need to create your unique value proposition.
When creating an analysis, always use segments to better understand your audience. Segmenting your audience and campaigns will help resolve specific concerns and market needs, pricing patterns, and decisions. Segmenting will help you generate an effective plan that will target specific demographics. Having this information will allow your organization to produce results and campaigns that work and communicate with all key demographics.
Know How to Fix It!
There are many ways in which you can gain data and information for your business marketing analysis. Half of your data can be pulled from online marketing programs. Offline data can be from, current customers, U.S. Census Bureau, Business.gov, Commerce.gov, and Bureau of Labor Statistics.
While you may find that tools can provide a tremendous amount of data, it means nothing unless you know how to properly analyze it. The data should be used as only the starting point for creating an effective strategy. While the data shows details as to where you are currently within the market, there are no computerized programs that can show you the true value and potential of your organization and market.
Because of this, you may want to look into hiring a business marketing consultant or manager to do the gritty work of helping you grow your business appeal, determine value, appropriate pricing, understand competitor vulnerabilities, and help you create a powerful and effective strategy for success.
