M is for Marketing Strategy

Do you have a marketing strategy in place? No, by this I don’t mean a marketing plan (although that’s great if you have one of these). I mean a marketing strategy – something that tells you end to end where each of your marketing fits in.

When I talk to small business owners they usually tell me about various marketing activities that they have planned for their business. That’s all great and I’m not knocking that at all, but all this will do is bring you in potential customers for your business.

By a marketing strategy, I want to know what happens to those potential customers once you have them. How will you follow-up with these contacts? What will you do when you sit down with them? What happens after you’ve met and so on?

Likewise, if people visit your website, what happens to them? Do you have a newsletter that they can sign up for? What happens if people contact you directly from your website? What information do you send them?

This goes much further than just outlining some of the marketing methods you’ll use to attract new business, but tells you exactly what will happen end to end in your marketing.

And the best news is that once you know what your marketing strategy is, you can begin to play around with it so that it works to consistently get you customers time after time.

When you get to this stage for your strategy and your marketing consistently gets you business, you can then create a system for it, write it down and then get someone else to do it for you thereby leaving you free to get on with other things.

But we’re probably talking further down the line for that…

For now, just make sure you have thought end to end about what happens to people when they come into contact with your business. This is the first stage in getting your marketing strategy in place and up and running.

Map out this process now and you’ll be surprised at how much you want to tweak each section to get it to work better for you afterwards.

Exceptional Thinking (http://www.exceptionalthinking.co.uk) provides help and advice to small business owners on their marketing and to people starting up in business.