5 Must Haves For Your Marketing Strategy

I’m Liz Hersh from Hersh PR & Marketing and I’m going to talk about the 5 must-haves of your marketing strategy. 

There are five things business owners should include in their marketing plan. The first one is specific and measurable goals. This can be in terms of a dollar amount or number of customers served in a given month or year. But they need to be specific and measurable. I like to use what’s known as SMART goals. So again they’re specific, you have a clear deadline and you know that you’re getting results. 

The next thing business owners need to include in their marketing plan is key messages and being specific about what differentiates you from your competitor. In any given industry, there could be hundreds or thousands of competitors so you wanna be clear on what sets you apart. And this doesn’t have to be super complicated, could be simple, like SouthWest: Bags Fly Free.

The third thing we recommend including in your marketing strategy are what we call buyer personas. These are detailed written descriptions of your best customer. So think about who your best customer is and create a little story around them: give them a name, where they live, how much money they make, some key characteristics, demographics and psychographics so that way you have a good sense of who your target message is trying to reach.

The next thing business owners need to do is commit to a specific set of marketing tactics. You have to keep in mind, again your key messages and who your best customers are. So if you’re targeting teenagers, Twitter and Instagram would be a great place for you, but if you’re targeting maybe a baby boomer, Facebook might be a better place for you.

The last thing business owners need to consider in their marketing strategy is their time line and their budget. We don’t all have a million dollar budget so you have to ask yourself— is it realistic to double my sales in a week, a month, six months? Take a look at your budget, think about what’s going to be realistic and what you can actually achieve. Adjust your goals as necessary but again and commit to the timeline. Do these campaigns and tactics on a consistent basis and then you’ll start to see results.