There are many different types of marketing strategies that your business can adapt. How you choose and it is best to develop one based upon your businesses needs and fine-tune as much as possible.
To gain a better understanding of the different types of marketing strategies, let's first take a brief look at how marketing is defined. Or simply, what is marketing.
Marketing can be simply explained as getting your customers (or potential customers) to enter into the marketing cycle and eventually buy your product or service. Done by communicating your offer or message through different mediums at the right time and for the right audience.
You can have a marketing strategy to build a clientele around referrals and networking utilizing a different marketing mix based on the marketing skills available. Or, you might create a strategy to launch a new product using Facebook Ads, or maybe you want to align your product with a social cause such as environmentalism.
So what’s a marketing strategy example?
Remember that the strategy is the overview and that the tactics are the step by step guide.
A strategy ties together the different types of marketing (online, offline, referral, networking etc) and the different functions of marketing into a plan that moves the business forward.
Example:
Strategy:
- Add Facebook as a Social Media traffic source and design a marketing funnel to sell a private membership product/service at $49 per month
- Grow the Facebook group page to 1000 members
- Assign a part-time Facebook group manager
Tactics:
- Offer a free intro to product/service
- Use Facebook advertising to target ideal customer
- Do a weekly Q&A
- Put a QR code for group, print on flyers and business cards and hand out
- Interview and hire a Facebook group manager
Overall this is part of a marketing plan example, and you must remember that plans and strategies change - and should - based on feedback and effectiveness.
To have a strategy that crushes the competition is about adaptability.
How you design a strategy is important, because as they say in the military "No strategy survives first contact with the enemy". To really develop an effective strategy you need to understand the relationship between the business goals, the overall marketing plan and how the strategy you are choosing to use fits in.
You need to also understand who your customers are, why they buy, where they are physically and online and what value your product/service has. People pay for what they value or solves a problem, and if you base a strategy solely on price you will lose unless you have endless money.
If you don’t think through a strategy you could end up with goal failure or worse, damage to the brand. Choose your timing and what goals to achieve carefully; unless you want to have results like this Nesquik campaign. Nesquik put money into developing a campaign around a hashtag (#nationalbunnyearsday) and an application that gave bunny ears to whoever used it.
Even the famous chefs Giada De Laurentiis and Bobby Flay used the application.
So far so good right?
Well the reason you haven’t heard about it is because Nesquik made up the day, rather than schedule the event for Easter. This means that the effort was wasted - all because of poor timing.
There are many examples of poor marketing strategies, and they mostly involve issues like cultural sensitivity and customs or are simply in poor taste. See this Ad Age article for more examples of bad strategies.
So what are some examples of marketing done right?
One of the best examples of designing and implementing a marketing strategy - specifically content marketing - is HubSpot. For those who aren’t aware HubSpot sells a blogging platform and other marketing services.
They practice what they preach and are constantly uploading content and giving away free, valuable content as e-books for lead generation. The strategy must be working because not only is HubSpot worth millions, they have plenty of visitors and users to boot. (Check out this awesome learning track by HubSpot for how to do your own inbound strategy)
Another example of a strategy that was executed well was GE’s Instagram campaign. GE wanted to get more interest in its products and services. They contacted 6 influencers on Instagram and gave them a tour of their facilities so that they could take pictures, upload and add tags. For each tour, GE’s Instagram account received around 3 million views. At the end of the campaign GE had over 3000 new followers.
All without paid advertising!
So remember that a good marketing strategy is one that plays to your businesses unique strengths (Check out this article by Marketing land for more examples).
It is using the channels that your customers most frequent, and having a plan to improve relations and/or get a sale at each stage of the marketing cycle.
In Summary:
- Understand your business goals, strengths and weaknesses
- Know who your customers are, where they shop most often and when they are likely to purchase (the timing).
- With this information you can design a strategy that destroys the competition
One more thing before you go.
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