5 controversial factors your marketing strategy should include
Wondering how to write a marketing strategy? Whether you’re creating a new one or refreshing your existing approach, there are five important elements that you should be sure to build into your thinking.
These are:
- Reviews
- Price
- Comparisons
- Problems
- Best provider
These are the core elements that customers want to know and will help to establish trust with your audience. Around 75-80% of your content should be relevant to at least one of these elements.
Let’s break down each point and explain why they’re important.
1. Reviews
What’s more likely to be believed? If you tell someone how brilliant you are, or if someone else says how brilliant you are?
A review from an external source – whether that be a publication or a customer – helps to validate the quality of your product or service. Sending your product out to review (or inviting people to try your service) can help build traction and establish your brand as a serious contender.
The simplest place to begin this is process is by setting up your Google Business profile so your customers can leave reviews about you on the search engine.
“But what if I get a negative review?” That’s not the end of the world. Having a perfect score might work against you as it could look like your reviews are manufactured. Like when dictatorial leaders win an election with 95% of the vote – it’s not believable. By having average and negative reviews, it helps to build trust in you. It shows you’re confident enough to present the full scope of opinion.
If you do receive a negative review, don’t ignore it – reply to it. Apologise for the disappointment and offer to find a solution. This shows you aren’t afraid to engage with your customers and make amends for any dissatisfaction.
That said, you do still want plenty of positive reviews. Northwestern determined that ratings of 4.2 to 4.5 are the most trusted.
Reviews from respected publications will also provide you with pull quotes to use on your website, social media, packaging and more.
2. Price
Tell us how much it is! If you hide your prices, the customer will have no trust in you from the start. By being upfront, the customer can make an informed decision about whether they can afford your product/service before getting too deep. This saves time for both of you and means you’re not chasing leads that would never have been able to afford you anyway.
If you’re offering a service, explain your pricing. What drives the price up? Is it time? Manpower? Busier times of the year? Speed of delivery? All of these are legitimate reasons to increase your cost, but the customer needs to understand why these variables are increasing their spend.
Similarly, if you’re offering a product – does it come with optional extras? Be sure to lay out a price guide for each of these too. Does your car come with optional leather seats or a built-in satnav? Spell out how much the basic model costs, and how much each additional extra will be.
If you have blogs on your website (you should), consider writing one to explain your pricing strategy. This creates good SEO content for your website and adds to the transparency of your transparency.
3. Comparisons
If there are similar products on the market, don’t be afraid to mention them. What are their strengths and weaknesses in comparison to yours? Be honest about these – if a competitor’s product does something better, don’t try to hide this fact. The customer will find out very quickly after the point of purchase whether your product fits their needs.
But that’s not to say you should only talk up your competitors. Highlight your own strengths; why is your product superior to the alternatives? Perhaps yours is more efficient, or cheaper per unit. Perhaps the two products are largely similar, but you offer a greater range of colours! Whatever makes you different helps you stand out.
4. Problems
If your product or service offers the solution to a particular problem, tell your customer how!
When you’re considering how to write a marketing strategy, think of yourself as the guide, and your customer as the hero. You’re not going on the adventure yourself; you’re providing the customer with the tools they need to succeed on theirs. They need to a defeat a villain, and that villain is their problem that your product can conquer.
Consider what the common problems of your ideal client would be and produce blogs in which you write about that issue. Offer solutions, but don’t only focus on yourself. Mention alternative solutions they might not have considered that might be cheaper or temporary fixes.
If they try those, and they work, yes, you’ve solved their problem for free, but you’ll have gained web traffic that will help push your website up the Google page rankings. If those fixes don’t work, they might come back to you and try your product as a next step.
5. Best provider
Be honest with yourself, and the potential client – are you their best option? If you work in car sales, produce blog content about the best places to buy cars in your local area, without mentioning yourself. This may sound counterintuitive, but if the Googlebots can pick this up as a regularly searched for question, it will help to drive more traffic to your website and doesn’t make you look biased. This is another opportunity to build trust with your audience.
If you offer a service like events management, produce blog content about the best events you’ve been to recently. Highlight what you liked and share ideas that you’d like to include in your own service. If this event was run by a competitor, mentioning them on your site could result in you ranking for search terms that include their company name, meaning you’ll appear in their search results.
Conclusion
The aim with good marketing is to remove all doubt from the customer’s mind. Don’t give them a reason not to trust you – if your pitch is too “salesy”, it’s actually off putting. Don’t write about how brilliant you are and how perfect your product is. So to answer the question of how to write a marketing strategy: Talk about the customer, what their needs are, and how you can best solve their problem for them.
