How would you rate your current marketing strategy? If you’re like many small business owners, you haven’t had time yet to sit down and develop a strategy at all.
It may be that even without a business strategy, your business is moving along at a respectable pace. But if that’s the case, how much more successful would your brand be if you took the time to plan your growth?
Review past and current brand efforts
The discovery process generally starts with what’s already known, and in the case of learning more about what strategies and tactics you should employ, that means starting with those you’ve already employed.
What efforts have you made to bring traffic to your website, to generate leads, to close sales, and to raise awareness of your brand?
Compile a list of all of the lines of communication you’re currently using to share your brand’s message: email newsletters, transactional emails, social media platforms, your brand website, white papers, etc.
How effective have these avenues been?
Assess the effectiveness of the tactics you’re already using. How many of those emails are opened by recipients? How far are your social posts reaching? How many visitors are there each day to your brand website? Finding the actual data that tells the story of your strategy’s impact will allow you to move forward wisely, getting rid of tactics that aren’t producing results and opting for new strategies that will.
Assess your competitors’ strategies
Do you feel a little twinge of envy when you visit your competitor’s website? Rather than wishing you’d thought of that cool social media idea, use it to inspire your movement forward. While it’s probably a mistake to regularly dwell on your competitor’s incredible marketing (because you’ve got your own incredible marketing to do), it’s a good idea to audit their strategies to make sure you’re not missing opportunities to take over communication channels that they’ve missed or to pose a friendly challenge to them on the channels that they’re currently dominating.
Tailor strategies to business goals
At this point in the discovery process, you should have a clear idea of who you are as a brand and what your position in the market is, who your competitors are and what they offer the market (and what they don’t), and who your audience is and what they need (or want).
Use this data to fine-tune effective marketing tactics and to develop a comprehensive strategy that leverages your unique value and your prospects’ unique desires. Building a varied strategy allows you to make the most of multiple platforms and extend your audience through blogging, guest blogging, and other forms of outreach.
If the idea of undertaking an audit of your marketing strategies and tactics feels overwhelming, get help. My six-week course Business Design Roadmap guides business owners through the discovery process at a steady, manageable pace. Let’s get started today.