By: Cassidy Poe
Whether you’re preparing to launch your brand, or just realizing how important marketing is for your existing brand, congratulations! You took the first step in developing a successful marketing strategy: realizing you need one. It is so easy to overlook marketing strategy while focusing on the nitty gritty details of compliance, distribution, and everything in between. This blog will help you learn the next steps you should take now that you’re ready to develop your brand’s marketing strategy.
- Determining your target audience
Depending on what audience you are targeting with your product, you have to approach your marketing strategy differently. Targeting the wrong audience, or too big of one, can be a waste of your time and money. It is essential to make sure your marketing efforts are geared towards the audience of people who would want to consume your product. Too many brands aren’t targeting the consumers that are actually drinking their products. It is important to do research to make sure this isn’t you. According to experts, there are a number of ways to do this.
If you’re just starting your brand, some methods to determine your target audience include:
- Researching your competitor’s audiences
- Looking into industry trends
- Interviewing or surveying potential customers
If you have an established brand and are looking to improve your marketing strategy, some methods to determine your target audience include:
- Analyzing data you’ve collected
- Considering your social media analytics
- Researching your competitor’s audiences
- Looking into industry trends
- Interviewing or surveying current customers
Through these activities you’re looking to determine how your audience spends their time, where they consume content from, and what their interests and personal demographics are. With the information you’ve gained from your research, you can develop a customer persona, a detailed summary of every important characteristic to describe your ideal buyer, which includes what methods of delivery would be most effective for your marketing campaigns.
2. Picking the right channels to focus on
Once you’ve determined your target audience, it will be much easier to initiate effective marketing activities. When you have a clear audience in mind and know what messaging would be most effective to reach that audience, you’ll save lots of time. Things like copywriting, social media marketing, and email marketing will be much more successful too.
In the most recent episode of The MHW Mark podcast, guest Spencer Hoddeson, Founder of Gay Water, explained his marketing strategy. He talked about how important building community is and how knowing his target audience before launching his products made it possible for them to not spend any money on social media marketing. Gay Water’s marketing strategy works because they know their audience cares about community, meaning organic social media is a valuable method to get their brand story out there.
When deciding what channels to focus on, keep the customer persona front of mind. If you want to utilize social media, ensure you’re only using networks that your target audience uses. You have to take into consideration multiple aspects of the customer persona at once. If they’re part of Gen Z then Instagram and Tiktok could be the best way to reach them, but if they’re interested in things like learning different cocktail recipes to make at home then Pinterest could be useful.
The same goes for content marketing. Knowing what someone who aligns with your customer persona would research when considering buying your products will help you to create content that answers their questions. Strong SEO efforts will ensure this content reaches them too. Another large part of your marketing strategy includes in-person tastings. Knowing where your target audience is located will make these fruitful.
These are just 2 of many steps involved in creating a powerful marketing strategy, but with these completed you’re on your way to long-term success!