Great marketing is rarely about doing just one ad one time and hoping for the best. It is about a well-conceived campaign based on a marketing strategy.
Here are the questions you need to answer as you develop your marketing strategy:
TARGET MARKET – who is my customer? What are their demographics (age, gender, location)? What are their unmet needs? What are their attitudes to my category? Are there any pain points they currently have that my brand solves? What are their hopes and dreams and how does my brand help get them there? What channels do they spend time on (Facebook, Instagram, Google etc)?
MESSAGES – what different messages do I want to put out there. Remember, great advertising is usually pretty single minded so, if you want to put a number of different messages out there into the market (e.g. different product lines, seasonal sales, special offers etc), you are better off running different ads rather than trying to cram everything into one ad.
PROMOTIONS – sales and special offers need to feel exciting and fresh. So, even if your brand is almost always having some kind of promotion, you will want to change how you frame that regularly so that people see your ads as new news and feel inspired to take action now.
SEASONALITY – when are the peak times when my customer is thinking about my category? This might be time of year (summer, back-to-school, Christmas, Valentine’s Day), time of month such as “just after pay day” or week (weekends vs weekdays) or even time of day (when they get to work or arrive home).
Once you have answered the questions above, you can plan your marketing strategy for the year, listing out all the different ads you are going to run… who they are targeted at, what their key message is, when they will run and what special new promotions they might feature.
