3 Quick Thoughts To Improve Your Strategy In The Next 90 Days...
Hey!
I’m going to make this one fast because I’m in the middle of soccer-fest…meaning, the boy has like 6 games this weekend and I’m his transportation.
But I want to share some quick hits on marketing that I think might give you something to think about this week and over the next few weeks…and that will hopefully give you something useful to take action on.
1. Step back and look at your marketing and ask yourself if you are product-focused or customer-focused?
Product-focused means you started out building something and are now trying to find folks that should or will buy it.
Customer-focused means you are looking at your market and asking questions about what they need and how you can help them solve those problems.
As an example, the iPhone is definitely customer-focused because no customer would have been able to articulate that the combination of all of these items would have been what they wanted when the iPhone first came to market.
Compare that to the season ticket offers that I am seeing in my inbox from teams around the country that are only trying to entice me to pay last year’s prices for potentially being able to go to games next year by offering me a discount of between 10-50%.
That’s product-focused.
One works a lot better than the others.
I’ll let you guess which one.
2. Are you targeting folks in the right way?
Is your market speaking to a specific need or audience?
Have you allowed your marketing to drift into the mass market focus, but without a real need for it to be there?
Do you know how or why you are segmenting your market in that way?
Targeting is like rocket fuel for your marketing if done well.
3. What are you budgeting for?
I’m an advocate of zero-based budgeting in your marketing.
This means, I don’t think you should allocate to tactical aspects of your marketing from the start. Instead, you figure out what you are trying to do, what you want your marketing to look like, and budget accordingly.
Right now, when we hear about marketing budgets and budgets in general, we are hearing folks talking about “defending their budgets”.
The reality is that your strategy should have changed due to the pandemic and with those changes, so should your budget.
Has it?
Or, are you allowing your budget to coast?
I’m sort of in a head space where I’m getting back to the basics of marketing…so keep these 3 keys in mind:
Focus on the customer first. Value.
Target the right audience.
Make your marketing budget decisions based on where you are going and what you are trying to achieve. Reach
No matter what I do, I come back to value, customer, and reach.
See you later!
Dave