No room for guess work in marketing

1. Research

Conducting research should be the first step to any marketing strategy. It allows you to make more informed decisions – from market trends and competitors to customer insights and needs.

The marketing mix – known as the 4Ps of marketing – is the place to start to understand what you are marketing and where. These are the 4Ps:

• Product – this is the item or service you offer to satisfy your customers’ needs and wants. It’s important to identify what differentiates your product from those of your competitor(s). It’s also important to determine if other products or services can be marketed in conjunction with it.
• Price – what consumers are willing to pay for your product. We need to consider costs related to research and development, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution – also known as cost-based pricing. Pricing based primarily on consumers’ perceived quality or value is known as value-based pricing, and quite often explains why consumers are prepared to buy a more premium-priced product than a cheaper alternative.
• Place – where you sell your product. Is your product best being widely available, or would it be better to be sold in selected stores to maintain the premium perception?
• Promotion – the activities that will sell your product. This might include advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, and public relations. It is important that we consider budget available to pay for the marketing mix as that will determine the places to promote your product and how often.

By collating that lot, a fully-fledged marketing plan will start to take shape.

3. Spend and return on investment

Let’s just dwell on budget a little longer. Namely, does your budget match your objectives/goals?

For example, without the funds, you can’t advertise on the right channels and create the right content to have the powerful impact you’re looking for. Getting a high ROI isn’t cheap.

But don’t forget, a strategy can start small with a hyper focus on one or two goals and build in more as the ROI is generated.

And because not all marketing is focused on products, customer-service businesses rely on other marketing tools that include three additional Ps:

• People, your people, who interact with customers.
• Processes that creates a seamless customer experience.
• Physical evidence, or the area where customers and company representatives interact.

All of these tools are used to promote a product or service and build brand awareness and customer loyalty in order to generate revenue for a business.

5. Knowing your customers

Identifying the personas of those accessing your product or service in another important factor that takes the guesswork out of your marketing strategy.

What do we mean by personas? Here’s how personas are born:

• Demographics – the age, gender, education, location and profession of your customers.
• Psychographics – the study of consumers based on psychological characteristics and traits such as values, desires, goals, interests, and lifestyle choices. Psychographics in marketing focus on understanding consumers’ emotions and values, so we can market more accurately. The main types of psychographics are interests, activities, and opinions. It’s why your buyer buys.
• Lifestyle – non-work factors such as hobbies and pastimes such as going to the cinema or eating out for example.
• Behaviour – brand loyalty, channel preferences and traits such as shopping habits.

7. Metrics & Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

We’ve saved the best until last. Every marketing strategy must include metrics and KPIs so we can understand how well your strategy is working.

Metrics and KPIs relate back to your objectives/goals. They are based on:

• Determining what your KPIs are going to be in the first place – so you can evaluate performance and progress.
• Choosing your content channels.
• Deciding on the type(s) of content to create.
• Creating and distributing your content.
• Analysing and measuring the results against a set number of actionable benchmarks.

What has our work achieved?

The following statistics from our digital team reveal the impact our work has achieved for Be Well. Between June and November 2022, Be Well’s Facebook reach increased by 134%, with even more impressive figures for Instagram, which saw reach increase by almost 600%, impressions increase by 589%, and profile visits increase by 66%.

Website clicks have increased by 1,000% and the number of followers have increased by 24%. Twitter retweets (the sharing of Twitter content) increased by 77% and the number of followers increased by 19%.