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Whether you are a solo entrepreneur or have a company with many employees, you need to develop a marketing guide because it is the best way to stay on track and make sure that you are doing everything you can to grow your company.
A marketing guide is a document that outlines your company’s goals to reach your target audience and the strategies for reaching them. It helps you stay focused on what matters most so that you can make effective and efficient decisions within your company.
Here are three other reasons why you should create a marketing guide as soon as you start your business:
1. Determine the direction of your business
Having a marketing guide for your company will help you have more clarity on the direction and the purpose of your business.
To do that, start by defining success for yourself; and make sure that your definition is measurable and achievable. It should be something that you can measure with a progress report at any time during your marketing period (e.g., month-to-month) so that you know whether or not the goal was met by the end of it.
Outline your business goals for the next 5 years, and make sure that they are clearly defined and understood by everyone working in your company. With all the goals outlined and written down, everyone knows how they can help contribute towards achieving them. From there, you can break them down into annual goals and then to as little as 100 days from the first day that you launch your marketing strategy.
2. Identify your target market and perfect your buyer persona
Your marketing guide will help you identify the problems that need to be solved for your target audience, and will inspire you to come up with creative solutions.
Once you get clear on what you want (your goals) and define who you are trying to reach (your target market), develop up to 7 social personas and create content as if you were speaking directly to them. In marketing, personas are representations of your ideal customers or clients.
Developing a few personas helps you better communicate your value to each one of them through the various marketing content that you distribute. A social persona can include age, gender, race, location, education, religious background, annual income, etc.
This process will help you figure out how much time and money you can put into marketing, as well as what kind of content works best for your audience.
3. Research your competition
If you want to be a successful business, it’s important to know your competition. There are several reasons why this is essential:
- You need to understand what your competitors do well and what they don’t do well. This will help you determine if there is a market for your product or service, as well as how much money can be made from it.
- If there are other companies in the same industry as yours, these companies will often have similar goals and focus areas. Knowing what these focus areas are means that you can avoid focusing on them yourself if they aren’t worth the time and effort (and might even make things difficult). However, if one of those focuses looks promising enough that it could lead to success for both companies (i.e., if both businesses would benefit from working together), then looking into ways of cooperating—or at least staying out of each other’s way—is definitely worth considering!
TIPS TO KEEP IN MIND
Review the current state of your business
Before crafting a new marketing strategy, take the time to understand where you are today. Take a look at the current state of your business and its marketing efforts, including
- The channels that are currently in use (i.e., social media, email marketing, and sales platforms)
- Marketing and promotions tactics currently used for each platform
- Metrics used to track success rate and ROI (Return on Investment) on each channel (i.e., customer satisfaction surveys or average monthly revenue per customer). This will allow you to determine if there’s room for improvement in any area based on current results.
If you need help determining how successful your current campaign is, try using an analytics tool like Google Analytics or Kissmetrics that can provide insights into how different audiences respond to specific content types like blog posts versus videos versus infographics, etc.
Use data to help you make decisions
Data is your friend. It’s a fact that in today’s business world, the companies who use data to make their decisions are far more likely to succeed than those who rely on gut instinct or no information at all.
With the right tools, you can use data to help you make better decisions faster and to help you make more informed decisions on a consistent basis. This will allow you to only focus on the decisions that are relevant for both your business and your customers instead of guessing what works—which means happier customers and a better reputation!
See your guide as a living document, not a static one
A marketing guide is not a static document. The idea is not to set it up and leave it alone. You need to keep your company’s marketing plan up to date so that you’ll always be on top of your game.
Here are some tips for making sure that happens:
- Review your plan regularly—at least quarterly (more often if you’re in an industry where trends change quickly). Revisit the goals and objectives at the start of each quarter and adjust them as needed.
- Update this document regularly with new information about competitors or market conditions as it becomes available—for example if one company comes out with a new product or service that is similar to something your company has already introduced, include details about how yours compares favorably in terms of cost or quality.
CONCLUSION
If you’ve read this far, you probably agree that it’s time to create a marketing guide for your company. If you don’t know where to start, start by checking out the 17 Items to Include in Your Marketing Guide where you can learn about various strategies that you can start implementing today.
We hope that you’ve enjoyed this article. If you need help to get more clarity on your marketing strategy, schedule a call today and one of our consultants will help you.
To your success,
— The Startup Hive TEAM
At Startup Hive, we help creative entrepreneurs thrive beyond the gig economy by taking control of their financial life. If you consider yourself creative enough to get at least one of your ideas off the ground, we are here for it.
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