A Step-By-Step Guide to Building Your Perfect Marketing Strategy

So, you’ve developed your product exactly as you envisioned it, all your friends and family love it, what next? Time to start selling it, right?! Well, not yet… people need to know your product is for sale first — you need to do some marketing. But how exactly do you build the perfect marketing strategy to draw in the most potential clients?

Here’s our step by step guide to building your own marketing strategy, with the worked example of launching a PC repair shop.

1. Pick a Target Market

The first step in building any good marketing strategy is to pick a target market — the group of people who you think are most likely to buy from you. These are the people at whom you want to direct your marketing efforts, as they will show the greatest ROI (return on investment). This process of choosing a target market and making sure that your message reaches them is called “targeting”, and we’ve even written an entire article on just that topic.

In our example:

Think about who is in most need of having their computer repaired. The majority of young and middle-aged people grew up (or are growing up) with technology, while the elderly didn’t. For a PC repair shop, the elderly are definitely a viable target market.

2.Choose Appropriate Ways to Reach Them

Now that you’ve decided on a specific target market, you need to determine the best way to reach them. Should you use online marketing or traditional marketing? Is your target market more likely to engage with you over the telephone or over social media? Do they even own a television? These are the sorts of questions you need to ask yourself when deciding how you want to approach your potential customers.

In our example:

We want to target older people who are still likely to use computers. Why not try to reach them with newspaper or television ads? Both of these media are ones which they would consume, and they also show that they are still likely capable of using a computer (and don’t struggle with seeing or hearing).

3. Clearly Communicate Value

Once you know through which mediums you’re going to communicate, it’s important that you carefully craft your message such that your target market will easily see the value in what you are trying to offer. Make sure that you are understandable and persuasive — these two things together can sell almost any product. Another way to approach this step is to focus down on the problems that you are trying to solve, and clearly demonstrate that your product is capable of doing so.

In our example:

Clearly state that you are offering a PC repair service without using any overly technological terminology.

4. Create Return Customers and Referrers

If you’ve done the above three steps correctly, sales should start roll in without any trouble. However, if you want to take it to the next level and begin selling exponentially larger quantities of product, you need to create customers who will themselves return for more and also refer you to others. To do this, make sure you consistently under-promise and over-deliver, give out discounts for future purchases, and keep previous customers updated about your business without spamming them.

In our example:

Be friendly and helpful to ensure that customers would call you back if they ever run into any other problems, and make sure that they’d be satisfied enough to refer you to friends.

That’s all there is to our four-step marketing strategy template. To recap quickly, here are the 4 points to remember:

Pick a target market

Decide how to reach them

Communicate effectively and persuasively

Build return customers and referrals

What else do you think are some essential steps in building the perfect marketing strategy? Let us know — we’d love to hear!

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