If you are not very familiar with marketing, other than promoting your business, there are many aspects that you are probably leaving out and that you should be including in your marketing strategies. At Twelve12, we want to help you find out if you are leaving important marketing activities behind.
First, you need to be sure what types of marketing you need – is it local? Such as Orange County marketing? Or is it international? Do you need a combination of digital and traditional marketing? Or just one of them?
Being realistic, most companies are very focused on digital marketing right now, and this is because digital marketing offers a wider range of possibilities and the cost compared with traditional marketing is considerably lower too. So, let’s focus on the very first step before you make any decisions. This is the situation analysis.
There are many methods to assess your company’s position, but it is common to use a SWOT analysis (stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) and a PEST analysis may be useful too if you want to be thorough (stands for Political, Economic, Social and Technological). You will find that some authors also suggest a market analysis or a competitor analysis and others, but the SWOT analysis may include all of it. My suggestion is that you start from basic analysis and find out what information you can come up with and then include all the necessary information depending on your needs. Nobody can give you a set recipe, and if you try to include everything you can at your first attempt, you’ll get a lot of confusing information and you won’t be able to pick the most important information for your case.
Keep it simple and then add more. When you are able to determine your current position, you will also be able to decide where you want to be, realistically, of course, define goals and timeframes. After you are done with that, define a plan to get where you want to be, this step is very important because it is where you will define what you are going to need in terms of marketing, for example, branding, market share, sales, etc. You should also keep in mind that you can’t do all at the same time, so prioritize and plan the tactics and actions accordingly. Finally, you need to monitor your efforts and adjust, change or continue as you see fit.
As you can see, it takes some experience and a lot of work to even begin planning the best marketing strategies and define the specific actions. If you want to know about Orange County marketing or if you need some help with your marketing, give us a call today, at Twelve12 we’ll be happy to hear from you.