Marketing campaigns that are run when you don’t understand your customer, your advantage over the competition, or what’s going on in your industry, are bound to generate less-than-great results or downright failure!
Here are three of my favorite rules for analyzing a client’s marketing strategy.
1. The Marketing Persona – Know Thy Customer
Today marketing personas are used to understand customers and communicate that understanding to employees and other stakeholders. A marketing persona is a story written about each customer segment your company serves. The persona in the story is given a person’s name, and the story describes the customer type’s attitudes, likes, dislikes and needs. Creating and sharing marketing personas makes it easier for everyone to understand, empathize with, and make better decisions about the customers you serve.
As B2B marketers, we worked for a long time with demographics. We looked for people with certain titles, incomes, educations, age in a certain geography. As marketing and sales became more competitve, we got a little smarter. We started looking at psychographics. What motivates our prospect? Where do they go? What do they read? All these were clues on how to reach them.
But now that buyers have control over the purchasing cycle (we used to call it the sales cycle, because we marketers and sellers had control of the information), we need to intimately understand the buyer. We need to walk in their shoes. What is a day in their life like? What things can we talk about that will help them connect and engage with and like us? The marketing persona has been used by ad agencies for years. They knew that for creatives to “speak” to the right audiences, they had to get inside their heads.
2. SWOT Analysis – Know Thyself
SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis is well known and easy to understand. But, it is extremely difficult to do this accurately. The main difficulty is in being brutally honest about the state of your business or organization and about the strengths of your competitors. It is human nature (and especially with business owners) to see and believe the best about your company.
3. Blue Ocean Strategy – Know Thy Industry
Blue Ocean Strategy originated as a book co-written in 2005 by Kim Chan and Renee Maubourne and published by Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. It is an approach in which businesses create “blue oceans” of uncontested market opportunity rather than compete in the existing bloody “red ocean” market space. I like this model because it encourages breakthrough strategic thinking. What marketing opportunity hasn’t been tapped yet? What other audiences exist that we can sell to?
Don’t jump into marketing programs and activities without thinking strategically first. How well do you know your customer? Your company (and are you honest about it or are you in denial)? Your industry? I hope these three strategic planning tools will help you answer the critical questions before you start marketing.
