The main focus of any marketing strategy is to deliver targeted messaging to the right audiences. 

Many tactics help drive inbound traffic like blogging, social media posts, Search Engine Optimization and  Pay Per Click. However, when management is preoccupied with operational matters, supply chain, and other day-to-day activities, the marketing strategy can get neglected. It is very important to draw a roadmap for the marketing team in the first quarter to streamline goals for the business. 

Steps of Marketing Strategy

The strategy must be drafted but it should have the flexibility for changes at any point in time.  The steps for making an ideal business strategy is very important:

• Conduct thorough market research before starting.
• Educate your audience with simple and well-written content.
• Set personalized marketing messages. 
• Focus on off-page content like guest posts, social media posts, forums, and more. 
• The importance of videos, animated images, podcasts, and webinars
• Automate the email marketing campaigns
• Speak about your services and product and hit the market with everything in hand.

Importance of Market Research

The industry you are dealing in will have several people already working in it, like your competitors, research refers to the businesses and agencies offering their services and products in the industry. Keep a close eye on your competitors, and supportive industry so that you are updated with all the industry events. It is like doing your SWOT analysis and it should have the following factors; 

Primary

• Polls
• Survey
• Focus Group

Secondary

• Articles
• eBooks

Qualitative

• Product Service type
• Competitors

Quantitative

• Social media
• Pageviews and bounce rates etc.

When you are observing what your competitors are doing and what people are searching for and what they are looking for every day to fulfill their needs. You get the idea of the market needs and demand of the buyers, if they are looking for a certain product or feature and using a specific “term” for it, work on it for your business. Here the word “term” is referred to as the Key Words. 

If you are still wondering why research is important? It is the beginning step as it gives you the exact position of your product and services, your target market, audience mindset, and keywords. 

Importance of Content

The website content has been taken very casually by businesses, but you will be hearing a lot from the SEO team to focus on the web pages as well as your social media posts, blogs, and articles. So it is rightly said that “choose your words wisely”.  It involves some basic steps and sections of writing as mentioned below. 

Keywords

The exact word of a user who is looking for a certain service are keywords for the businesses, analyze what people are looking for, what words they use.

Take an example of someone looking for reading about the Marketing Strategies, he may write in google as marketing strategy,  or market strategy, marketing strategies, market strategies, and more such words, all referring to the same context. All these are the keywords and you will also have the most searched word along with the region. The keyword searching tools are available that provide you list without any cost like keyword tool, ahrefs, workstream, etc. 

On-page content

If you already have a website, audit it to update it for the latest trends and market needs, refresh with keywords and keep the content simple and easy to understand. The on-page content should be simple and full of keywords so that whoever seeks a certain service or product on your website should appear in a Google search. 

Blogs and Articles

It is often underestimated, but people want details on products before purchasing. Provide them with a complete guideline on all the relevant topics of your business, don't’ leave any topic unattended.  You can write blogs for your website or go on  forums and publishing websites  This provides you with  backlinks and awareness

Social Media

Social media holds the greatest power of capturing global markets. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are where you will see businesses being extremely active. They share not only about the product and services but also the current events, holidays, and more. Sharing pictures, videos, content, and links is a regular practice. 

Importance of Videography

It is said that actions speak louder than words, but eyes have a better understanding so your content should have more images, tables, animations, icons, and videos.  

Youtube is the second greatest search engine, by your channel and publishing ads, you can increase your ranking on Google. Google gives more ranking to the videos and tables so your web pages and blogs must have a perfect mix of content and images to create a balance for the readers. 

Affiliate Marketing Programs

Affiliate programs can provide great exposure to your business but you must have the right partner in doing so. Promote others and earn from it- those who are getting links from your web pages will pay you for sales and it will increase your web traffic. Conclusion

When you make a plan at the beginning of the year or even before the start of the year, it helps if you make a complete roadmap before walking on it. You have two benefits of doing it, one is you come up with the calculations of the previous year and you have your market situation in front of you.

Take an example of the year 2020, it was the year of pandemic, digital industry boomed where many businesses went down, each business came online and employees worked from home. So 2021 has been a mixture of it where on the one hand people have been locked down for almost a year but also got confident in purchasing online. 

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