How To Create An Effective SMB Marketing Strategy

Do you have a small to medium sized business (SMB)?

Whatever your business goals, you need an effective marketing strategy to achieve them.

81% of SMB owners attribute their business success during the pandemic to their marketing strategy.

71% felt Marketing strategy was critical to the survival of their business.

In this article, we’ll look at how to create an effective marketing strategy for small and medium businesses and measure its results against your business goals.

What is the marketing strategy?

Marketing strategy includes what your SMB needs to achieve specific business goals through marketing.

This includes:

• The goals you want your business to achieve.
• Snapshots of your current work to compare KPIs to a later date.
• A clear definition of your target customers and their location.
• Explanations of the steps behind getting your brand in front of your target audience.
• Plan to measure the performance of your marketing campaign against your footage.
• Ways to adjust your tactics accordingly.

Why is marketing strategy so important?

According to a survey by CoSchedule, so were the marketers who documented their strategy 414% More likely to succeed in achieving their goals through marketing.

What is the difference between marketing strategy and marketing plan?

Within your marketing strategy, your marketing plan defines the tactics that will be used to achieve your business goals.

Step 1: Define goals for small and medium businesses

Before you can create a marketing strategy and start defining the tactics your small and medium business will use, you must define goals.

What do you want to achieve as part of your overall growth through marketing?

Most businesses want to increase revenue, so we’ll use that as an example.

While increasing revenue is a great place to start in setting SMB goals, you should keep in mind the SMART goal setting rule.

Your goals should be specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and timely.

A great example of SMART’s goal for small and medium businesses is to “increase revenue by 33% by the end of the fourth quarter.”

A SMART goal will allow you to detail the specific needs to achieve that goal, such as the number of additional items:

• The clients you would need to generate that revenue.
• The leads you may need for your sales team to generate enough additional customers.
• The website visitors you would need from your marketing to generate enough leads.

Now, you have a specific goal for your marketing strategy – to increase the number of visitors to your website who are most likely to convert from visitor to lead, and eventually convert from lead to sale.

Step 2: Create a baseline

Before you start running marketing campaigns, you need to document the key metrics that will establish your baseline or starting point.

A baseline will allow you to identify marketing tactics that generate specific numbers, such as increasing site visitors, callers, and leads.

For example, if your current marketing goal is to increase website traffic and generate more leads and you plan to run campaigns on multiple marketing channels, you need to know how many website visitors and leads you are currently receiving from each of those channels.

This allows you to create SMART goals and compare your success to where you started.

Step Three: Determine the best tactics