How to Create an Effective Marketing Strategy

In this post I’m going to share what you need to know about effective marketing. And how to put together an effective marketing strategy for your business.

What makes an effective marketing strategy?

An effective marketing stratgey is made up of the methods that bring you the best results for your time, efforts and/or investment.

It’s about:

• Understanding your customers.
• Providing products or services that meet your customers needs.
• Marketing that prompts your potential customers to buy from you.

An effective marketing strategy includes a mix of activities combined into an overall plan

Why do you need effective marketing?

If you want to raise your busines profile, get more customers and make more money, effective marketing is the way forward.

Let’s face it, spamming Facebook groups withs ad-type posts, sending constant sales emails and Social Media post after post of ‘here’s my product, click to buy’ doesn’t work well on a long-term basis.

How do I Create an effective marketing strategy?

Effective marketing depends on many factors and it’s always best to create your own strategy based on you, your business and your customers!

Here’s how you can do this:

1. Check out this post to create a basic marketing plan.
2. Review any marketing you have done previously and compare the results from each activity.
3. Take into account your personality and unique talents.
4. Play to your strengths and where possible minimise your weaknesses.

Finally, combine all this information to develop a new strategy that will help you to grow your business.

Pro Tip – 

Don’t try to do everything and be everywhere, start small with 2 or 3. Once you conquer those then start to incorporate new channels.

Take Each Marketing Channel Individually

Not all marketing channels are equal. Some will bring quicker results, others may take tons of effort for very little return.

Social media markerting requires different tactics to email marketing or blogging.

Whilst, all these are marketing methods than can can bring exceptional results, they all work differently. Treating them individually will get the best results. 

Here’s an example for how Social Media marketing differs across platforms:

Twitter shows users every tweet from the accounts they follow, in real-time. This makes the newsfeed move relatively quickly. Only the people online at the time the tweet goes out are likely to see it.

Facebook shows users a newsfeed using an algorithm based on their preferences and previous engagement. Giving each post a potentially longer life-span.

Therefore, using the same strategy on both platforms is unlikely to produce the same results.

Pro Tip – 

Test different methods to figure out what works well for your business. Then do more of it!

That doesn’t mean to say you can’t try out new ideas, but you should still continue to use the effective strategies alongside them.

Spend some time getting to know each channel. Some may work amazingly well for you whilst others won’t even make an impact on your business. 

Create a separate marketing plan for each of them and design your overall strategy to bring all of the individual components together.

Take into account all these points when building your strategy and you’ll soon have an effective marketing strategy that brings you the best results.