Six Steps to Creating a Successful Marketing Strategy

The Framework of a Successful Marketing Strategy

Understanding the Steps of an Effective Marketing Strategy

At Nolan Consulting Group (NCG), we provide coaching services to help our clients with every aspect of their business. We specialize in helping small businesses in the trades, including but not limited to roofing, painting, concrete coatings, landscapers, and general contractors. While word of mouth and referrals help build your brand and grow your business from the start, it’s essential to be thinking about the broader opportunities and creative strategies to increase your lead counts. At NCG, we can help you develop an effective marketing strategy, aligning the investment in marketing spend with your revenue goals that will pay off with increased visibility and greater lead potential. Contact us today for information on any of our business coaching services.

Step 1: WHY Are You in Business?

Starting and building a business is an all-consuming experience, but it’s important not to lose sight of why you went into business. Make sure YOU understand your WHY and that it’s well known amongst your team. Remember, they are front line representatives of the brand.

When you’re thinking about how to market your business, use your WHY to narrow your focus to answer a few key questions: What needs do your products or services meet? Do they solve any problems? Why is your business better than the competition? What is the value you bring to your target customer? When you work with a company like NCG, you have the advantage of business coaching services that can help you formulate and document important questions about your business.

Step 2: Create Detailed Profiles About Your Customers

Knowing your ideal customer is an essential component in developing a successful marketing strategy. While every business owner wants to market to a large audience, it’s more effective to market to the people who are most interested in your products or services. Think about the persona of your ideal customer. What sets them apart from other customers? What income bracket are they in? Do they have children? What do they care about? Create a detailed ideal customer profile and make them the target of an effective marketing strategy.

Step 3: Start Conversations in the Right Places

After you’ve identified and documented your ideal customer, it’s time to find the best places to reach them. Let’s go where they go! Does your customer base prefer Twitter or YouTube? Instagram or Pinterest? What radio stations, Streaming and T.V Channels are they tuning into? What events in the community are they attending and making time for? After determining the platforms, websites and community involvement your customers prefer, it’s time to start a conversation and be seen! Expand your presence with content created for those platforms that speaks directly to your customers’ needs and interests. At the very least, add commentary that provides value to appropriate posts, be responsive to customer interactions. This makes your company seem more personable and more likely to engage future customers.

Step 4: Be Useful, Helpful, and Relevant

When you’re adding comments or content, think about it from the standpoint of usefulness. It’s not enough to just say, “We’re the best! Contact us!” Can you provide information that customers can put to use? Most people have become accustomed to tuning out anything they perceive as an advertisement. Instead, strive to create content that offers something helpful to a potential customer that positions your company as a leader in the industry and your community. Not every communication has to be directly tied to your service, it can be about connecting your brand to lifestyle information!.

Step 5: Set Goals and Determine the Value of Customers

You want to see results from your marketing, which is why it’s important to set specific goals for your marketing strategies. Define what you want to accomplish, and find the best ways to measure your progress. Not all customers are equally interested in buying your products or services, so it’s wise to concentrate on those who offer the greatest potential for sales. Consider the profile of your customers, the age at which they might begin buying your products/services, how many friends they may bring to you as customers, the total amount of time they can be expected to buy from you, and the best methods to keep the customer relationship going. Invest in strategies that attract long-term, loyal customers and you’ll be rewarded with growing sales numbers.

Step 6: Track Your Work

Today’s technology gives business owners a wide array of tools to track marketing and customer interactions. Take advantage of the tech to get a closer look at the effectiveness of your marketing, and take a deep dive into the data to look at the statistics around engagement and interest. Data is a critical piece in the intersection of marketing creativity. If you’ve clearly defined your goals and measurements, you know the results you want to achieve and what success looks like. With careful tracking of your efforts, you can make continuous adjustments to your messaging and marketing strategy. Recognize that marketing is about trial and error – we have to try new ideas and continuously adapt to the customer environment and trends. The key here is tracking and monitoring so when you see a strategy NOT working, you can easily redirect and move your spend elsewhere.

Contact Nolan Consulting Group

At NCG, we understand the business environment and demands of the trades. We see the connection of shared best practices and strategies being utilized by our clients and want to help you be a part of that! We have great respect for the Trades and the efforts put forth by so many talented team members across all the organizations we work with. It’s fulfilling to see their success come from the discipline of well executed strategies and planning. When you work with NCG, you can count on getting guidance that will make a difference to your bottom line and improves the well-being of not only the health of the business, but the employees that make it happen.

Contact us today by filling out our contact form or calling our offices to speak to one of our professional team members to learn more about how we might work with you!