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There’s no more question about how to start your business. You should rather ask yourself how far you are prepared for the challenge. The real question high on today’s corporate agenda is how to develop a marketing strategy for 2023 and beyond.
In times of ever-emerging trends, companies of any scale and capacity are facing a myriad of road bumps underway in their business performance.
It is now high time to dive deep into the essence of a marketing strategy. Promodo experts explain what are the marketing strategies and why a strategic marketing approach is vital for business establishment, growth, and expansion.
Marketing strategy is crucial for planning your business venture all along the way. The concept of marketing strategy refers to a game plan pursued by business ventures to reach their customers, manage communications, sell more of their products and services, and expand to new markets. Value proposition, pricing policy, identification of target audience, and brand messaging are all integral to a marketing strategy.
At the initial stage, you should critically evaluate your business venture and its key performance indicators (KPIs). As our practice shows, many companies (especially startups) act intuitively by blindly trusting their sixth sense and fall into rabbit holes eventually, Kateryna Husachenko, Marketing Strategist at Promodo.
While companies are adapting to a new digital normal with ever-changing market conditions and rising customer needs, it is crucial to know your unique place on the market.
Before even setting up a business venture, be sure to explore your identity by asking:
Our marketing practice indicates that an overwhelming majority of startups fail to answer these focal questions. Mostly, business owners overestimate their performance capacity by downplaying even basic marketing strategies.
Within the first few months, things seem to be going well. Companies sell their products or services to the mass market and profit over time. However, when things start changing, most business endeavors fail without a properly elaborated marketing strategy, Kateryna Husachenko, Marketing Strategist at Promodo.
More to that, there’s always a day when troubles start knocking at your door. Once that’s the case, you’ll spot major flaws in your business performance. The most common complaints voiced by our clients are as follows:
In an overwhelming majority of cases, all these concerns are due to a lack of proper vision that is impossible without the development of a sustainable marketing strategy.
Essentially, marketing strategy is always about your business growth and development. It is also about substantial optimization of your marketing budget.
To play well in a competitive marketplace, be sure to study your market niche, target customers, and major competitors. You should clearly understand your growth points just as the gaps you are to fill.
The analyses of (1) market share, (2) communication channels, (3) competition, and (4) customer base are all critical as your strategic marketing tools. At Promodo, we estimate all these metrics through your target customer viewpoint, says Kateryna Husachenko,
You should never overvalue your market stance as exceptional. Rather, do your best to assess competitive offers and estimate the demand. Why people are buying from competitors and what is the added value they offer to attract and maintain their customers?
It is vital to beware of what your potential customers are asking of your competitors; all relevant issues and the smallest details from price to square meters are of great strategic importance here.
The deeper your market analysis is, the lesser your business will be prone to all possible risks. With a robust marketing analysis, you’ll increase profitability and pay off your invested time and resources.
One of our agro clients overenjoyed its market primacy and failed to work on its development. Over time, its competitors managed to regain a strategic market share and win a comparative advantage, Kateryna Husachenko, Marketing Strategist at Promodo.
Therefore, to develop and expand, you should prioritize marketing as a strategic must-have to understand your:
All established marketing models ranging from SWOT and PESTLE to Porter's 5 Forces articulate a vital importance of an initial understanding of the market.
To understand the nature of your business from within, you need to elaborate on an effective marketing strategy to answer most of the abovementioned questions. You’ll always stick to it as a reliable blueprint that will always lead your business throughout the marketing journey.
Furthermore, the SEO Department at Promodo employs online traffic analysis as well the demand analysis tools. This is to measure an actual demand within a niche.
Deeper clusterization enables us to segment an actual demand by categories. This resonates with the new market entrants that seek demand-supply answers to optimize their business performance:
In the case of MasterZoo, it seemed that our client had it all to make the best possible offer to pet lovers. Nonetheless, we still researched their competitors and spotted luxury offers. The latter attracted customers who looked for eco-foods. That way they have targeted the customers that were far more concerned about the health and well-being of their pets. Still, other pet brands would have much invested in their brand awareness and won competitive advantages owing to their loyal customers and fans.
Price policy may be rather sensitive as well. Even a 5% increase may play a decisive role in case of the best-selling items.
In terms of customer analysis, mass market, and niche-oriented surveys will all come handy to better assess your target audience. The amount of surveyed respondents with quantitative methods help us measure the niche capacity and real potential of every customer segment. This is how we assess your market potential and whether your business goals are achievable.
For starters, be sure to research your market and dive deep into a specific niche. The narrower your focus is, the more you’ll stand out from the competition.
A marketing strategy plan will help you spot your unique market stance that will shape your brand identity over time. Eventually, this is how your target customers will associate you as their preferred choice and the brand name different from the competition.
A sustainable marketing strategy will help you critically assess the capacity of your market niche as well as your potential as a business venture. In this vein, critical key performance indicators (KPIs) will serve you as a baseline for further development and subsequent expansion.
At Promodo, we particularly emphasize the importance of brand positioning for our clients.
We develop tailored brand positioning strategies based on marketing data, consumer analysis, and competitiveness. The focus on business goals and growth points helps us spot growth opportunities in product development, service, and communication.
As part of marketing strategy elaboration, we implement the Matrix approach to spot highly demanded products and services across client niches.
We take brand building as an integral part of a comprehensive marketing strategy that will make you stand out.
An overwhelming majority of our clients reach out to brand building whenever they want to:
We will help you build a consistent and highly trusted brand through robust research of your:
At the heart of a strategic marketing approach is an awareness of your customer journey. More precisely, you’ve got to know exactly how your consumers make purchasing decisions across your niche.
The prediction of behavioral patterns among your target audience is among the core challenges underway. A tailored marketing strategy will help you understand major shifts in:
With this in mind, you’ll actualize your customer profiles and offer them the best-matching products and services they need here and now.
As part of your marketing strategy, knowledge of your target audience profile is crucial. Every single aspect matters here ranging from psychographic data and communication touchpoints to purchasing triggers and actual needs voiced by your customers. In particular, without in-depth analyses of your customer profiles, you may lose from undeserving younger audiences likely to use digital options online.
There are also deeply-niched companies which you would hardly compete with. Owing to years of loyalty, they serve their stable customer base. On the other hand, though, here are niches, where customers explore 5-6 competitors before making a final purchase. A critical question here is whether you are among those lead players, and if not, what should you improve in UX/UI for instance to attract and retain customers, Kateryna Husachenko, Marketing Strategist at Promodo.
Further on, a secret shopper approach will help you explore the quality of services and post-sale touchpoints (if any) practiced by your competitors. Everything matters here from how you pack your products and what you add as your unique sales point (USP).
You will surely win your market share with a clear vision of what your customers want here and now. This knowledge will also help you outrun competitors. We are exploring valuable insights to boost your business growth.
In this vein, we dedicate a substantial amount of time and effort to explore core qualitative and quantitative market trends:
68% of marketers use qualitative research to better understand customers.
Qualitative research helps us determine your customers and what makes them buy from you. The method outlines customer buying preferences and indicates why people choose your brand.
We further apply quantitative research* to unveil your market capacity and niche segments. The methodology helps us understand how consumers compare your brand to the closest competitors. We emphasize the extent of consumer satisfaction with the products and services they consume.
Both qualitative and quantitative metrics are also at play when you need to personalize best-selling items on your website. The same is true when you are up to launch personalized e-mail campaigns.
*Qualitative research is relevant for collection and analysis of non-numerical data. In marketing, the method allows you to better understand concepts, user opinions and experiences. You’ll make the best use of qualitative methodology whenever you want to obtain in-depth insights or expand your research with new ideas.
*Quantitative research helps to collect and analyze numerical data to assess market patterns and averages. Marketers use the method to make predictions, experiment with causal relationships, and sum up the results for wider audiences.
In essence, your pricing, promotions, and market positioning all depend on customer profiles that are among core marketing metrics. We work on customer portraits to segment your target audience. With that, we consider anything from geolocation and hobbies to lifestyles and actual customer needs.
Based on this expertise, you will know:
In this regard, a profound marketing strategy will help you measure the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) of your website.
With a bunch of SEO tools, it is vital to detect the points where your pages are lacking behind to keep up with user expectations. More to that, your nearest competitors may have already emphasized mobile and app sales as a substantial source of competitive advantage.
Digital marketing tools will help you track user behavior on competitive websites. Herewith, it is vital to know:
With ever-changing market trends and shifts in customer preferences, it is vital to continuously update your target audience profile. Actual data will help you promote your offers in the right way. With a holistic marketing approach, you will know what additional services to include to please your customers.
Digital marketing also entails a plethora of analytics and data procession options. With analytics tools like SerpStat, SimilarWeb, and Ahrefs, you’ll retrieve focal data about your customers and competitors. Among other available features embraced by these platforms, you will conveniently track behavioral shifts among your target audience and know how to react to:
62% of businesses research their competitors every quarter.
Doing research work on competitors will help you better understand how they do their business and the ways you can stand out.
Integral to a marketing strategy, segmentation will help you spot your target audience for your brand. By defining and detailing your audience segments, we will objectively assess their capacity and advise you on key customer segments to communicate with.
Knowing the individual features and preferences of each of your segments will help you deliver targeted messages that best match customer expectations.
Individual customer experiences will help you segment your audience even further. In this vein, we rely on 5W and JTBD methodology.
5W segmentation will help you engage with the audience that most resonates with your supply. The strategic approach will help you spot your best-performing communication channels to expand sales capacity, launch effective promotions, and engage with more segments. The choice of the right communication strategy will eventually optimize your marketing budget.
Once you are up to attracting more users, launching a new product, or going overseas, use JTBD to get a robust profile of your target audience. With this tool at hand, you’ll dive deep into the daily habits and routines of your potential consumers.
By and large, all the versatility of internet marketing amounts to customization. This means you should strategically bet on personalization to customize your products and services in line with individual needs and preferences.
Reaching prospective consumers through quality brand messaging is essential to generate positive associations among your existing and potential audiences.
The art of communicating your value to the consumers is in a genuine understanding of people’s immediate needs.
While your long-term market performance is essentially about getting closer to your customers, focus on deeper customer centricity and wider engagement. In this vein, a detailed marketing strategy will help you prioritize value proposition beneath your goods and services by:
With a meticulously selected stack of digital tools, consumers are far more likely to make informed decisions throughout their purchasing journey. While smooth interaction is at the core of building proper consumer relationships, at Promodo we emphasize personalization.
It is of critical importance to ensure initial purchases and turn leads into loyal customers over time. There is a significant difference between a customer’s intent and actual purchase. In many cases, a company may be known on the market, though still would lack sales. This is when we apply a vast array of analytical marketing tools to spot major flaws and fill the void, Kateryna Husachenko, Marketing Strategist at Promodo.
To best resonate with your target audience, be sure to collect data on individual customer preferences. Over time, continuous interaction will spark a sense of connection and trust in your brand name.
The likelihood of each purchase depends on how well you create personal relationships with buyers. In a new digital culture that lacks face-to-face interactions, you should strive for strategic marketing beyond conventional mass marketing approaches.
At Promodo, we create outstanding brand messages by analyzing competitor business marketing strategies and channels. We also explore through an immediate media environment of your targeted audience to spot priority brand communication channels and optimize your marketing budget.
Reaching out to wider audiences is always atop of marketing strategy plans.
You should implement a business strategy through marketing, communication, and media channels to forward the right message to your target audience. The quality of message delivery is essential for how people will resonate with your offer. So, be sure to implement creative approaches and make the best use of social media channels to engage with the leads (your potential customers).
A well-tailored message will reveal your strategic vision and will attract people who resonate with the demand side. Herewith, at Promodo, we use Lead scoring tools to assess the demand side and purchasing power of your leads.
Herewith, it is crucial to know your customer needs, and how your offer differs from competitors. In the same way, you should distinguish your services and added value from already customized baseline features, like free delivery or a 5% seasonal discount, etc.
The acceptance of your unique selling proposition (USP) will much depend on the right messaging to your target and potential audiences. Once you use communication channels correctly, you will much save on your marketing spending, Kateryna Husachenko, Marketing Strategist at Promodo.
The development of a reliant marketing strategy is no less important for well-established market leaders. There is a moment when market players start saturating and seeking more points of growth.
With a Gap analysis, you’ll pursue your strategic development by:
With these approaches in mind, we better understand market fluctuations of ups and downs. In the same manner, we track what’s going on on our competitors’ end. What do they do differently and why we are lacking behind?
Our competitors may be benefitting from quality branded traffic, while we may still be left unrecognized. It is when we should emphasize our brand awareness. What are the most popular search patterns among our target audience: whether people are searching for brands or product categories? To what extent do price, popularity, and feedback impact final purchasing choices? Should we push lower checks and higher purchasing frequency?
What have our competitors done to penetrate new audiences? When was the point when we have been left behind and what are the best-fit ways to move forward?
Facing these challenges, a sufficient marketing strategy will help you grasp new niches, expand your assortment, and penetrate new markets overseas.
While penetrating new markets, we suggest either gradual growth or a fast-track expansion. A client’s budget may allow targeting top positions in a lead market like the United States, or a client may opt for moderate growth in the markets with geo proximity, lesser linguistic barriers, and cultural and mental sameness. In either case, we analyze the marketing capacity, growth points, benchmarks, and operational gaps featured by new market entrants, Kateryna Husachenko, Marketing Strategist at Promodo.
In one of our prominent case studies, we assisted Infoshina, an online store that sells car tires and rims for vehicles. We were challenged with the dilemma of “How an Automotive Market Leader Can Maintain the Dynamics of Growth?”
Since 2013, the company has shown stable expansion from a regional player to a nationwide leader in the online marketing of tires and rims.
Seeking new points of growth and major gaps (N% year-on-year) the company applied Brand Health Tracker and related brand monitoring tools.
Since 2014, we have developed growth strategies and performance campaigns for the client
The elaboration of a comprehensive marketing strategy helped us answer a crucial question of how to designate a proper development direction for the following 3-4 years. In pursuit of new business opportunities, we bet on market and competitor analysis.
Market analysis has shown:
In this pursuit, Promodo experts applied above 100 data sources and 30 analytical panels and authoritative business reports on car and tire markets to spot growth points and market barriers that would affect the client's business.
Brand expansion overseas is among the major marketing priorities when a business saturates its local presence.
In 2019, we helped the French sportswear network Decathlon bring its brand to the Ukrainian market. The client strategically emphasized a constant increase in website transactions and a positive return on marketing investment (ROMI).
We developed and implemented a pay-per-click (PPC) strategy for Decathlon online store as the most feasible solution to help the brand gain market share and consumer loyalty.
Furthermore, we decided to maximize the brand’s presence in the SERP without losing profit. For this purpose, we targeted the audience already associated with a demand for sports goods.
We introduced Decathlon to consumers who seek sports goods without prioritizing any particular sports brand. Our choice of Search campaigns and Google Shopping campaigns proved effective to reach users who were ready to buy here and now.
In the first stage Q. 2-3 2019, we needed to show what share of the domestic market Decathlon would penetrate and how users would react to the brand offers.
Search campaigns for priority sports categories and dynamic campaigns for the top products on the Decathlon website. We worked with 17 sports categories from the brand’s online store to identify the best ones to generate transactions. As a result, we managed to drive transactions by +372% and surge revenue by +286%.
In the second stage Q. 4 2019, we optimized current search campaigns with a focus on the best-converting product categories. We almost doubled the number of transactions owing to new shopping campaigns, dynamic remarketing on Google, and dynamic remarketing on Facebook.
Eventually, Decathlon’s transactions increased by +89% and revenue by +54%.
In the third stage, Q. 1-3 2020, we strived for the client’s maximum presence in the search engine results pages (SERPs) to increase its share in the niche and maximize the revenue without rising budget costs.
We had bet on the best-performing seasonal product categories and disabled the rest. However, to grasp presence in the search for disabled categories, we solidified and expanded dynamic search ad (DSA) campaigns. While brand traffic showed signs of growth, we additionally tested the branded campaign with keyword phrase combinations like ‘swimwear decathlon.’
A strategic focus on seasonal product categories brought in +60% of transactions and let the company increase revenue by +93%.
Overall, a robust corporate marketing strategy will help you:
Beyond the basic marketing strategies, Pomodo experts shared a bunch of cases where we helped our clients cope with the strategic marketing challenges underway.
From increasing brand awareness to driving sales, we deliver ultimate results beyond your expectations. We use all available tools ranging from market trend identification to consumer behavior analysis to empower your company’s marketing strategy and drive business growth with valuable insights.
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