business planning

7 Steps to a Marketing Strategy

As a solopreneur it can be really hard to find time for strategy. After all, you’re already wearing multiple hats. Sometimes strategy feels like an afterthought.

But doing marketing without strategy is like trying to build a home without an architect’s house plan. You can hire the very best carpenter, electrician, and plumber, but without a plan you’ll probably end up with a mess.

The same goes for marketing. Sure, you can find a great graphic designer, web developer, content writer and social media manager. But if you don’t have a strategy you can waste money and time very quickly without any results to show for it.

Follow these 7 steps to develop your marketing strategy.

Notice this starts with understanding your Market and your Customer, not your Product.

The first four steps help you build a detailed picture of your ideal customer.

Then understand their needs and pain points… That allows you to properly message your Product to serve their needs.

Finally, the communications strategy is just about identifying the best way to reach your ideal customer where they are looking for solutions.

Learn more about the Seven Step Strategy here, where you can also download my ebook on the 7 Step Marketing Strategy Process.

Create Your Go-to-Market Plan

A successful launch can be a critical ingredient to the long-term viability of your product or service. Here are some ideas to help you plan a successful launch to really boost your product or company’s success. You can also use our Go-to-Market Toolkit to plan your go-to-market strategy for launch.

Photo by Anna Nekrashevich on Pexels.com

Having a strong go-to-market or launch plan will not only help ramp your sales once you do launch. It can also give you a feel for the marketplace. The reaction of potential customers to your product pre-launch marketing can help you complete final tweaks or positioning of your product before launch rather than scrambling after.

The Go-to-Market Toolkit includes a go to market strategy template, “How to Launch Your Product” guide, checklists and go-to-market plans that you can use to make sure your new product or service introduction is as successful as possible.

These are just some of the benefits for your Go-to-Market plan:

  • Easily create a professional plan to launch your product or service.
  • Save time by using our templates – the hard work is done for you!
  • No more headaches not knowing how to plan your marketing.
  • Free up your focus for important product development tasks rather than worrying about promotion.
  • Target your messages to the best prospects and channels to maximize your launch impact.

Click here to check out the Go-to-Market template.

Learn How to Listen to Your Market

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

How well do you listen to your market?

Do you base your business decisions on your customer feedback and input?

Or do you go with what you think they “should” want?

This article on Market Orientation will help you better listen to your customers and use that input to guide your solo business planning. It’s an important skill to have, and helps you be frugal with your focus, delivering what your market really wants and needs.

Read more here: https://www.sevenstepsmarketing.com/market-orientation.html

Strengthen Your Business During a Crisis

I love this quote by Andy Grove, founder of Intel Corporation: “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, good companiesAndyGrove survive them, great companies are improved by them.”

The current COVID-19 pandemic is tough on many businesses, especially small businesses and solopreneurs.

Of course, you have to focus first and foremost on how NOT to let this crisis destroy your business, and how you can survive it.

But strong businesses will emerge from this crisis even stronger than they were before. So how can you build a GREAT company, and leverage this to improve your business?