Laying the Foundation for Your Marketing Strategy

Having a marketing strategy is essential, whether you’re starting a business or growing an existing one. However, your marketing efforts may not yield much if you don’t lay the right foundation. New businesses have to build the foundation from scratch while existing ones need to reevaluate it occasionally.

Many factors are involved in building a strong foundation. Given that the average attention span of consumers is 8 seconds, you want to create the most effective marketing strategy. Your target audience, brand identity, and structure of your website are among these factors.

The interaction of these factors, among others, is the foundation of your marketing efforts. Let’s have a look at each of them in-depth.

Develop Your Target Audience

All your marketing efforts target people with specific demographics. As such, before you get started with your strategy, you have to understand the audience. Think about the current or aspirational customers; who they are and what interests them.

It’s worth mentioning that people usually buy based on their pain points and challenges. According to Guido Bartolacci, Head of Demand Generation for New Breed, you should build your marketing message around that. When you understand your audience’s challenges, you’ll create a message around how your product or service offers a solution.

One of the ways to create these answers is to document your findings into buyer personas. Through these semi-fictionalized representations of your deal customers, you can create the reality of their expectations. These are based on their day-to-day life, educational backgrounds, and probably the work they do.

The buyer personas come in handy in helping determine whether your marketing efforts align with individual needs. This is a much better strategy as opposed to determining how a particular tactic aligns with the entire target audience.

For products aimed at the B2B market, it’s essential to understand the companies your target audience works for. You may find that the buying personas and companies have close similarities and share in the pain points. From this understanding, you can largely increase your team’s ability to sell.

 

Related: Introduction to Tech Stack

 

Create Your Brand Identity

Once you understand your ideal customers and their challenges align your product or service with their pain points. This is where your business’ value proposition comes in. It’s the channel through which you communicate why your business is the best choice to solve those challenges.

Your brand identity comprises your tone, voice, and design. It’s the ultimate determinant of how the market perceives and embraces your business or product. It goes beyond how the company looks and sounds, to what customers think, feel, and do when they see your brand.

The information you gathered in your persona-building process should inform how to curate your identity to closely match the audience. As such, the branding process should take into account the core values of the company and the brand’s attributes.

As you create your brand identity, consider how you’ll position your solution against your competitors. Look into what your competitors are doing and approach clients with a slightly different language. Positioning your solution as other products in the market may not resonate well with potential clients.

The aim here is to check the existing gaps and strive to fill them by positioning your brand differently. Again, let the information you gathered in creating buying personas guide you in how to talk about your solution. Capitalize on these details to shape your marketing content and design strategy.

Implement a Design Strategy

After creating your brand identity, you need the collateral that’ll accompany and enhance the marketing efforts. It’s like the map that shows you the route to your destination, which is the brand identity. You have values and attributes that you want to convey through your brand.

The design strategy is the channel that communicates the brand identity. When the design is in place, it adequately conveys all the thoughts, actions, and feelings established in the branding process. The aim is to convey to customers that you have the best solution to their challenges.

To execute your design strategy, you first need to establish a brand style guide. The brand style guide is to the brand identity what the buyer persona is to the target audience. Carefully choose your logos, colors, fonts, and tone of your copy and ensure you maintain consistency throughout all your designs.

When executing your design strategy ensure

  • It’s not only aesthetic but also functional
  • It resonates with your target audience
  • There’s consistency- a prospect can quickly look at the design and associate it with your business
  • The channel or medium you’re designing for informs and influences your design

With every design, ensure it communicates your brand identity. Try to stand out in the marketplace by encompassing the visuals that adequately tell your brand’s story.

 

Related: The Ultimate Marketing Tech Stack 

 

Establish a Web Presence

You have defined the buyer persona, created a brand identity and communicated it through the brand design. The next task is to give all that a place to live. According to Guido, “your website is the vehicle and place where all that is stored.”

Your website is the medium of communication and the tool for lead generation. It should be the place where a prospect is guided from their pain to a solution. This brings out the emphasis on the importance of crafting the buyer person as early as possible in the marketing process.

How you design the user experience on your website is directly influenced by the buyer personas. The journey from the pain points to the solution determines website navigation and content organization. Remember to incorporate your brand identity through the tone, visuals, and overall look of the website.

Put Revenue Operations in Place

Your website will start generating leads, and you should be able to answer how to continue the conversation. Revenue operations are the piece of your marketing efforts that ensure all the work you’ve put in so far yields results.

For example, how do you lead a prospect to become a customer? Conversion on a content offer doesn’t necessarily mean that a website visitor is ready for sales. Keep them engaged with your business by capturing the right information and enrolling them in an email nurture campaign.

With the right information for the right buyer persona, your marketing automation platform should send relevant content to prospects. Persona mapping and lead scoring tools determine whether or not a lead is a right match for your business. The tools used by the marketing team and those used by the sales team should resonate for the best results.

Takeaway

While this piece merely outlines the aspects of the foundation of a marketing strategy, you should educate yourself further. Even if you’re not at the beginning of the process, it’s crucial to consistently audit and reevaluate the strategy in place. As your customers, business, and solution evolve, so should your brand, personas, and website.