How Do You Create A Marketing Strategy For A Small Business?

Ever wonder about the best marketing strategies used by companies? What makes them stand out from the others? The simple answer is strategy.

A marketing strategy is similar to a basketball coach’s game strategy; both aim to outmaneuver the competition and achieve success. Success for the basketball coach is scoring more points than the opposing team. Success for business owners is (usually) focused on generating the most sales possible. A coach studies the strengths and weaknesses of his team and opponents to craft effective plays; a good marketer analyzes market trends, customer behaviors, and competitor actions to create an impactful marketing strategy. 

With a basketball coach’s mentality, let’s consider marketing for business owners and how to create a winning marketing strategy for your business.

How to create a marketing strategy

A marketing strategy is the game plan for executing various marketing activities. Your strategy should include creating customer personas, crafting brand voice guidelines, conducting a competitive analysis and audience research, mapping our customer journeys, and tracking campaign data. 

In basketball and marketing, timing is crucial! Just as a basketball coach rotates players to maintain peak performance and shifts momentum during the game, marketers need to focus on relevant topics “in season” and schedule campaigns to coincide with their target audience’s interests and needs. 

Of course, both basketball coaches and marketers must be agile, ready to pivot strategies based on real-time developments, ensuring every move maximizes efficiency and impact to secure a win.

How do you create a marketing strategy from scratch?

When creating a marketing strategy from scratch, you are looking at the basketball court and available marketing resources before the game starts: the plays can be called any way you like. If you want to focus on content marketing strategies (blogging, newsletters, social media, etc.), then build your solid foundation by creating customer personas, crafting brand voice guidelines, conducting a competitive analysis and audience research, and mapping our customer journeys. From there, sketch out the best content marketing activities as dictated by what you learned from your personas and industry research. 

Your personas may dictate, however, that paid per click (PPC) advertising will give you more slam dunks, so outline campaigns and timing as it relates to those marketing activities. As long as you begin with your target audience in mind, you’ll have everything you need to get the ball into the hoop – and score! 

How do you create a marketing strategy for a small business?

When looking into marketing strategies for small business research, it can feel more like you are a rookie in a march madness bracket – it’s very overwhelming as you consider all of the options available to you. But whether you are a Fortune 500 company or mom and pop shop, the strategy is the same: build personas, craft brand voice guidelines, conduct competitive analysis and industry research, and chart customer journey maps. 

The marketing activities will be unique to your business based on this foundation…and your budget. A small business doesn’t always have a large budget to execute over-the-top marketing campaigns, but owners and marketers can get creative with their money and tap into low cost marketing strategies that fit their audience, workflow, and budget. 

How do you write a simple marketing strategy?

You may be wondering, “how do you write a simple marketing strategy for a business?” It’s easy to think you can just post on social media and send out an email here and there to find marketing success. While that might score a few points here and there, it’s certainly not going to help you win the marketing game consistently.

Here’s a quick step-by-step guide to keeping your marketing strategy straightforward:

1. Build ONE customer persona who represents your target audience. Many businesses can have more than one. For example, Crafted Voice Communications has 3 and have an international client that has 6. But one persona may be all you need to get started. Learn everything you can about this persona: demographics, buying habits, motivations, challenges, identifiers, where they hang out in person and online, etc. Document it.
2. Identify your competition and do a deep dive analysis on them: what marketing activities are they doing? What response does it get from their audience? What is their messaging? What differentiates them? Where are the gaps that our company can potentially fill? Pretend you are back in college: do the research, write a report, present your findings to your stakeholders…you can even pull an all nighter, for old times sake if you want to really go all out!
3. Draft your brand voice guidelines – decide on everything about your tone, style, personality, messaging dos and don’ts. Document it.
4. Map out where, how, and when you will be communicating with your audience. This customer journey map is the beginning stage of defining your marketing activities. Will you post on social media? How often will you send emails? What ads will you run and will they point to specific landing pages on your website?
5. Write it all down – this is your marketing strategy!

This foundational work is so important, you can’t keep it on the bench, nor can you give it to an intern or the summer help. Building a market strategy is integral to your businesses success and it needs to be your star player.