How To Develop A Marketing Strategy In 2021

(Newswire.net — March 28, 2021) — The year 2020 was the tipping point for many businesses to fully support digital. The stay-at-home mandates during the pandemic made online businesses surge, and for many businesses, their online component is no longer treated as an afterthought they provide to customers. This 2021, going digital is the way to go. So, marketing strategies for businesses have to be updated for 2021.

The pandemic pushed e-commerce to reach levels not expected to be seen until 2025; this year, e-commerce overall sales are expected to surge to USD$843 billion. With the changes that occurred the previous year, this year would be mostly about finding ways to connect to wary consumers, preparing marketing tools, and rolling out fresh, creative marketing strategies.

So, how can your business benefit from the new opportunities this year? Businesses should make a comeback; expectations are high, despite some uncertainties that need to be hurdled. How can your brand meet expectations this year?

Developing A Marketing Strategy

The previous year has taught businesses the importance of being flexible—the ability to quickly adjust to any situation. The circumstances brought on by the pandemic forced many businesses to rethink their major decisions regarding their plans and their marketing strategies. Marketing strategies, as well as their budgets, were rendered irrelevant.  

       

This year will most likely still feel the reverberations of the pandemic. Moreover, consumer behavior isn’t likely to revert to the relatively halcyon pre-covid days. The implications for businesses, of course, are huge—and not only about consumer behavior, but about the changes in regulation and new technologies. All these will require preparation and adjustment.  

Below are ways to develop a marketing strategy for this year:

1. Set Your Marketing Objectives

First, you need to define your marketing objectives for 2021. Keep in mind that at the core of every marketing plan is a list of clearly-defined strategic marketing objectives. They’re the framework on which your marketing team’s goals are defined, for giving instructions to the team, and for providing data for managers to review and support. For example, if one of your marketing team’s objectives is to improve market reach using outbound marketing, you’d have to choose the most efficient way to achieve this, as well as the most cost-effective. You’d also have to consider different tools and technologies, or companies which could provide solutions, like ringless voicemail providers.

2. Assessment Of Current Marketing Plan

Now that you’ve set your marketing objectives, the next step is to analyze your marketing team’s current efforts. You need to find out what your team is doing right or wrong, as well as the adjustments that have to be made. The best way of doing this is to peruse data applicable to your business. 

You could use Google Analytics to ascertain which marketing campaigns and efforts generate the most profit and traffic. By analyzing reports from the tools, you’ll know which components from your previous campaign were effective. Then, you can incorporate them into your new marketing strategy for optimal results.  

Those campaigns that are no longer working should be discontinued, or you can improve an existing component that’s overdue for a revamp. For example, if your sales pipeline seems to be drying up, you should choose a more effective approach that could help you increase sales and conversions, like using text blast.

3. Analyze The Marketing Campaigns Used By Your Competitors

You should also take a look at what your biggest competitors are doing. Chances are, if they’re thriving, you might want to find out what they’re doing right. No matter which business you’re in, you can usually find competitors that are doing something you could emulate or improve upon. You can visit their landing page, or use analytic tools on their websites.

Website analytics will help you see your competitors’ efforts at marketing their products online and how effective their SEO (search engine optimization) is. You can also see their advertisement campaign on social media by using Facebook’s Ad Library. That way, you can take note of their pricing strategies, messaging, media, promotion channels, and others. 

You don’t have to duplicate their strategies though. Knowing what your competition is doing is always valuable information. Just create a more streamlined campaign that’s more suited to your organization.

4. Identify Your Market

Having a clear, well-defined market enables SMEs (small to medium enterprises) to compete with much larger companies. If you identify your market as those interested in what you have to offer, pet owners, or the whole family, you’d have a hard time—these targets are too broad. You need to narrow them down. But, you mustn’t think that aiming for a specific market is excluding a good chunk of segment that doesn’t fit your criteria. 

Look at it as focusing your marketing campaign on a certain market segment that’s more likely to be interested in your product or service. If your products, for example, are outdoor gears, then targeting mostly young, active people is logical. Doing it this way is more cost-effective and efficient. A shotgun approach to marketing doesn’t usually work. 

Identifying your market takes research. You have to define their demographic (age, gender, occupation, etc.), and psychographics (personality, lifestyle, values, etc.). It would also help if you can segment your market—your target audience may still be too broad. By segmenting your market, you can tailor your campaign for each of these segments and produce more positive results.

5. Start Developing Your Marketing Strategy

Now that you have an idea of whom to target, you can now start laying the foundation of your marketing strategy. You’ve probably heard of the 4Ps: product, price, place, and promotion. These are key factors of marketing that sum up the basics of marketing strategy. 

• Product – Your product should be clearly defined; it can either be goods or a type or types of services that satisfy a specific demand. Your customers should know what your product offers, what problem it solves, and what benefits can be gained from it. All these should be understood by your target market. 
• Pricing – This is the monetary value of the service or product your market is willing to pay. Price isn’t only based on the intrinsic value of your product. The overall supply costs should also be considered, as well as the production costs, the competitors’ prices, and more.
• Place – This refers to where your product is being marketed, whether online, on a brick-and-mortar store, or both. Your customer should have a clear idea of where to purchase your product.    
• Promotion – This refers to the product’s marketing or promotion. Marketing your product is how you can convince the market to use your product. This should show the different steps you’ll use to reach your audience.

Your marketing strategy should have detailed specifics of each element of marketing, including the 4Ps. Although marketing strategies and avenues have changed greatly over the years, the basic elements of marketing have essentially remained the same.

6. Define Your Sales Funnel

A sales or marketing funnel is simply your customer’s progress from “just looking” to actually buying your product. In other words, these are the steps to make somebody become a paying customer. Understanding your marketing funnel is crucial—you can locate the weak points, or “holes” in the funnel where prospects leak out. By knowing the “holes’” location, you can plug them up immediately.

If you understand how marketing funnels work, then you can use them to your advantage. Typically, the sales funnel has four main stages:

• Awareness – This is where the public becomes aware of your product for the first time, whether through social media, advertising, word of mouth, Google search, or others. A few times, it may even be one of those serendipitous moments: being at right time at the right place, where the customer buys your product right away. It could mean that the customer had done his or her research, knows your product’s desirability, and the price is within the expected range. More often than not, though, awareness is catching your customer’s eye.
• Interest – The moment your product catches the eye of a prospect, they’ll evaluate it based on how interested they are. They’ll also evaluate it based on how the product can satisfy their need and how it stacks up against other brands.
• Decision – Suitably informed and curiosity piqued, the prospective customers will then evaluate your pricing as well as the packaging options. Customers will be seriously weighing their options, and this can be the time for your team to step up to seal the deal. This is also the time when you make your best offer, like free shipping, discounts, or freebies.   
• Action – The last stage is where your client makes a purchase or not. If no sale occurred, you can always do some tweaking and make sure no experience is wasted. If a sale transpires, you can focus on customer retention—make sure the clients are happy with their purchase.             

If you can design your marketing strategy around the marketing funnel, you’ll have better chances of attracting not only traffic and leads, but better conversion rates for your company as well. 

7. Set Your Marketing Budget

Now that your marketing strategy is almost done, you need to allocate a budget for this. The budget will be ultimately determined by how much you’re willing to spend to reach your goals. Ideally, you’d have to spend about 5% of your total revenue on marketing to maintain the status quo. However, if you want a bigger market share, the estimate is around 10%.   

But, these figures are just rules of thumb; many factors can affect a company’s decision on how much to allocate for marketing. The budget might depend on the company’s standing in the marketplace, its market share, and others. If the business has multiple products, it might have to budget its marketing differently based on each product’s status on the market.

An industrial, business-to-business (B2B) corporation might spend something like 1% of their net income on marketing their established products, but there are also a number of companies that spend, at least, 50% of their net income to launch new products. At the end of the day, your marketing budget would depend on your desire to grow—how much and how quickly. After all, it takes money to make money.             

8. Implementing Your Marketing Strategy

Implementing your marketing plan is perhaps the most crucial step in the entire marketing strategy. It wouldn’t be much of a plan if it wasn’t put into action, right? So, how would you implement your marketing plan?    

If you’ve allocated sufficient resources and expertise in implementing your marketing strategy, then it has an excellent chance of succeeding. It’s important that you communicate with your staff. They should know what their roles are to ensure the plan’s success, and how the marketing strategy dovetails into your overall business goals, policies, and priorities. 

You should also discuss beforehand whether your team has the capability and readiness to implement your marketing plan. Moreover, your progress should be monitored diligently. Your marketing plan isn’t set in stone; it should be flexible and adaptable. Revisit your marketing strategy and check if it needs any tweaking.  

Don’t forget your contingency plans. Remember what Mike Tyson said: “Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Plans don’t always work, so you must be prepared to adjust as the situation dictates. Have a backup plan, perhaps be flexible on your deadlines, add another step or factor to your plans, and refine and adjust your marketing goals.

Remember to seek the advice of somebody more experienced. Developing, implementing a working marketing strategy, and measuring marketing metrics is a specialized field. Consulting experts could make the difference between success and failure.

Conclusion

The previous year made many businesses rethink their marketing strategy to accommodate the surge of online businesses because of the enforced lockdowns. For this year, marketing strategies should incorporate the lessons learned last year. Your marketing strategy should be flexible and adaptable, with contingencies in case the situation demands it. 

Furthermore, some aspects of marketing strategy development can require expert advice, so be prepared to seek out other agencies to help you out in some aspects of the plan.