A Strategy that Helps Your Bottomline
Marketing is all about understanding the life cycle of a product and addressing the ups and downs before they happen. Whether you’re introducing a new product to the market or dealing with the maturity stage where things start to slow, a solid marketing plan can help keep your product relevant. At Big Red Dog Marketing, we have worked with companies of all sizes across the U.S and know that marketing can be a confusing topic. To help, we put together a few things that every business owner should know about implementing a successful marketing strategy.
Marketing is an Investment
Marketing doesn’t happen overnight! A business needs a well-developed plan implemented over time through multiple platforms. Most marketing plans follow a similar framework where consistency builds confidence in your service or product to increase sales. Here are some general guidelines for marketing.
- Marketing messages must align for both digital and traditional platforms. Movement between channels has to be seamless and consistent to provide a clear message.
- There is a constant assessment of what is and is not working to ensure the marketing plan is successful and reaches the targeted market.
- Trust in your brand will grow your core customers and build brand loyalty. Don’t simply focus on the leads and sales.
- Creating quality content for your audience is an absolute must! The content needs to be meaningful to your targeted/ideal audience.
- All social media strategies must work together to market your brand and business.
Marketing is Constant
Every product or service goes through a product life cycle — development, introduction, growth, maturity and decline. There is no service or product that is immune to each stage of the cycle, and there is no definitive timeline to reference when it comes to each stage. However, a solid marketing plan based on research and data can help navigate the cyclical impacts. Through marketing, a business can make
- Informed decisions based on each stage of the cycle
- Increase ROI and company profitability at each stage
- Proactively alter the brand message to stay connected to the target audience
- Maintain or improve customer loyalty and product appeal
Marketing is Knowing Your Target Audience
Sometimes it seems like a broken record is playing in the background when implementing a marketing strategy because ALL the focus comes down to knowing your target audience. Your target audience is the group of individuals you hope to reach with your marketing efforts and those who are most likely to spend money on your product or service.
A target audience is broken down into common characteristics such as gender, age, location, income or purchasing power. The best way to understand your target audience is to dive deep into your products and services and ask the following questions:
- Why do they buy from us?
- What brings them back?
- What are they buying?
- What are the commonalities between these individuals?
Discussing and defining a target audience allows two things to happen 1) to create a better understanding of the marketing strategy needed to meet your target market needs/wants 2) to focus your marketing efforts on individuals who are more likely to take action and purchase your product or service.
Marketing is more than Advertising
While marketing and advertising share a common goal — to alert consumers to a product or service — there are differences. Marketing uses relevant data and research to reach a target audience (there is that term again 🧐). The process sets the design, creation and implementation of the marketing strategies.
Advertising is the process of making a product or service known to an audience. An advertising campaign relies on timely offers, creative positioning and catchphrases to ensure a product resonates with the consumer. With this definition, it is easy to see that advertising is actually a component of marketing!
BRD Marketing a Business You Can Trust
Big Red Dog is a full-service marketing company based in Raleigh, NC. With clients located across the country, we focus on what your business really needs and understand how to make your company competitive to deliver high-quality results. From website redesign to SEO, we tackle any marketing need to help drive quality traffic to your website, raise conversions that build results and solve those complex problems every business owner faces.
Want to learn more about our team and how we can help your business? Feel free to give us a call at 919-926-8727 or email us at hello@bigreddog.marketing.