Your company is about to launch a brand-new product and you’ve been asked to write a marketing strategy—but do you know what it should include?

7 Features of an Effective Marketing Strategy

A marketing strategy is your overarching plan of how you’ll reach new customers and help them learn about your product. The aim of the document is to help you increase sales, build brand awareness, and grow your business.

However, if you’ve never worked on one before, it can be confusing to know how to get started. To learn more, keep reading to find seven features of an effective marketing strategy that can help your business find success.

1. Work Out Your USP

One of our top marketing tips is to first identify your USP or unique selling proposition. How can you market your product if you don’t know what’s special about it?

Your USP should be a list of reasons why your product is more superior or more effective than similar products on the market. These are effectively your reasons why a customer would buy your product over another.

To work out your unique selling proposition, make a list of all the features and benefits of your product and work out what it can do that the competition can’t do. You’ll want to highlight these features in your advertising to help your product stand out.

When launching a new product, consumer focus groups can also help you learn more about what buyers love about your product. You can use this to your advantage in your advertising, as feedback from real customers is extremely valuable.

2. Identify Your Target Customers

The next step in writing a successful marketing strategy is identifying your target customers. Spend some time working out who would buy your product, ideally.

Think about gender, income brackets, hobbies, careers, and where your customers might live. You want your advertising to appeal to your target demographic, so it’s essential to understand who they are.

If your advertising doesn’t appeal to the audience you want to reach, you’re going to struggle with selling products.

3. Analyze Your Competition

For your marketing strategy to be effective, you also need to spend some time analyzing your competition. This is a type of market analysis and it allows you to work out where your business fits in and how it compares with others.

Look at what other companies similar to yours are doing in terms of advertising strategies. Notice also how they’re pricing their products, where they’re being sold, and any other key information that you can use to your advantage.

While you never want to copy what your competition is doing, it’s valuable to learn how they’re marketing and it can give an indication of what’s working (or not working) within your industry.

4. Set Measurable Goals

You need to set goals as part of your strategy that is clear, achievable, and easy to measure. After all, the aim of a marketing strategy is to improve your marketing and help you sell more products—the only way to see if you’ve been successful is by setting goals that you can track.

Spend some time thinking about goal setting—your goals should be challenging to achieve, but not impossible. Decide where you want your company to be in six months or a year from now, then work backward to decide what you need to achieve to get there.

5. Outline All of Your Marketing Techniques

Next, work out which marketing techniques you’ll use to sell your products. Depending on your business, this might be a mix of both traditional and online marketing advertising and promotions.

Again, your techniques will vary depending on your audience. If you’re targeting teens, for example, you might want to invest in social media advertising.

Or, if you want to reach business owners, maybe digital ads or an ad in a local business directory would be more effective.

You can read more here about marketing strategies that might help your merchandising business.

6. Don’t Forget to Include Budgeting

Most marketing isn’t free, unfortunately, so you’ll want to include a section in your strategy regarding budgeting. Work out how much you can afford to spend on marketing.

Then, break it down into sections, working out how much you’ve budgeted for each specific type of ad or marketing. You’ll want to track your budgeting regularly, making sure you’re not over or under budget.

7. Be Creative

Our last tip for your marketing plan is that you shouldn’t be afraid to be creative! Marketing is challenging, with so much competition out there, so it’s harder than ever for new businesses and products to get noticed.

For this reason, try to think outside the box! What can you do that’s new, innovative, or different that can help your new product fly off the shelves?

Hosting a few brainstorming sessions with staff can help, or you might even want to hire an external marketing consultant for guidance. Although trying something new can be risky, it can also lead to success.

Write an Effective Marketing Strategy With These Tips

For your business to be successful, you need to take marketing seriously. To get started, use the tips above to draft an effective marketing strategy that can benefit your business.

This will be an important document that your whole company will use, so take the time to make it comprehensive and useful.

Once it’s complete, refer to it regularly, so you can check that you’re on track, making progress, and achieving your goals.

Get started today and see how a marketing strategy can transform your business!

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