Marketing strategy Rautaki whakatairanga

Marketing is essential for helping you understand your customers, meet their needs, and send the right messages about your products and services.

Marketing is more than promoting. Often called the most important part of business, marketing is a broad term that covers everything you do to:

• understand what customers want
• understand your industry
• ensure your product or service fits the market
• connect the right customers to the right product or service
• get your brand, prices, and promotion right.

Marketing activities can help you prepare for the future. Review your products or services and where and how you sell them. With a clear strategy you can spot opportunities to improve and update aspects of your business. 

To build awareness of your business, research where your customers get their information from, so you can promote your business in the right places. 

To develop a new product or service, research what customers need and what’s already available in the market. Then you can provide something that meets those needs and has a unique selling point.

To reach new customers, find out who are the most promising people to target. Your brand, product and promotion will help you communicate with them and encourage them to buy from you.

To stand out from your competitors, research the effects of a brand refresh, pricing changes, or unique product features that could give you the edge.

Marketing is a broad term and it can be tricky to know where to start. Use tools and resources to help you plan:

• surveys and feedback
• conversations and observations
• data insights
• customer journey maps
• branding
• understanding of customer decision-making
• promotion tools
• marketing communication.

With its own budget, marketing is less likely to be an afterthought, and something you can recover through an improved profile and more sales. Below are four of the most popular ways to set your marketing budget.

Spend to achieve objectives

Set objectives, figure out which tasks will achieve these objectives, and estimate the cost of those tasks. 

Sales-based budget

Dedicate a percentage of current or forecast sales income to marketing. 

Spend to match competitors

Keep your marketing budget close to your competitors' or match the average for your industry. 

Stick to what feels affordable

Set a marketing budget based on what you can afford from your profits.  

Each of these ways has advantages and disadvantages. Research them, get expert advice, and be open to adapting if needed.  

Knowing your customers is critical. Surveys, conversations, and statistics can help. Another effective method is to create personas – fictional profiles of ideal customers.

Personas can help you:

• picture who you want to sell to
• refine your products and services
• engage better with customers
• boost sales.

Splitting your customers into groups, using personas, helps you target the right people and helps them connect with your business. Getting your targeting right helps save money by focusing on promotion that hits the mark.

Promotion is what most people think marketing is all about. But promotion is just the part of marketing that covers ways you share ideas about your product or service with customers. Examples include:

• talking with customers in store or online
• social media posts
• tendering
• exhibiting at trade shows
• advertising on billboards or flyers
• discount coupons offered online or on letterbox leaflets. 

The internet is changing how businesses promote themselves. It opens up new ways to find the right customers, and to communicate with them.

Marketing includes all the ways you can research who your customers are and how they behave when planning to buy what you sell. 

You should identify:

• how customers make decisions in general and when choosing what to buy
• the steps they follow before, during and after buying your product or service.

Sales data and other business information can help you understand how valuable customers are to the business. You’ll want to know the cost of gaining each new customer, the profit each time they buy something, and the total profit over their lifetime as a customer.