As a business owner, you know the importance of having goals, as they give you a clear idea of what you want to achieve and when. But how do you plan to bring those plans to fruition? Do you know the appropriate tools, techniques, and technology to facilitate your objectives?
Achieving your goals works best when you reinforce them by conducting marketing with the correct tactics. That's where many small business owners fail. They may have quality products and services but aren't aware of or don't know how to implement the right strategies for getting their messages in front of their target audiences.
In this post, we’ll provide valuable tips on choosing marketing tactics that will propel your business to the next level and offer insights into how to follow through to achieve ongoing success.
Matching Marketing Tactics to Achieve Goals
Setting goals is something most business owners have done. Visualizing end success is rarely an issue for most business owners – but understanding the right steps to reach them is often less clear. After defining your marketing goals, the first step is to work backward to help you determine the steps necessary to achieve them. Let's look at some marketing strategy and tactics examples.
For example, if your objective is generating more leads, you need to plan your strategy to reach your pool of potential customers and encourage them to sign up or share their information. To initiate your strategy, you need to understand the specific tactics to use, such as content marketing or social media campaigns that get people to want what you provide enough to give you their email or phone numbers for more alerts. If your goal is increased online sales, you could instead leverage email marketing and SEM tactics. This procedure makes it easy to keep your eyes on the prize while simplifying your marketing approach.
Break Your Strategy into Manageable Stages
It's easy to get overwhelmed trying to find the right path when looking only at the horizon. The same is true with your marketing goals. Everything becomes clearer and more achievable when you break your marketing tactics down as part of a bigger mix. In other words, categorize them in more manageable ways.
Using one of the examples above, you may know that you want to leverage a social media campaign to generate leads. You'll first need to identify the steps necessary, such as the following:
- Identify your target audience
- Choose the proper channels for your potential customer
- Create a compelling offer
- Use targeted lead generation ads that include the special offer
By breaking your strategy into more manageable stages, it becomes much easier to see the tactics that will most effectively attain your goals.
Keep Your Audience Behavior in Mind
Understanding your audience and how they consume media is essential when identifying the most effective tactics for reaching them. Audience insights are critical when trying to identify the information that will be most impactful. In other words, identifying their interests, priorities, or behaviors can help you meet them where they spend their time and are most receptive. For example, if your research shows your audience often reads online articles, you can leverage native content to better resonate with them.
Review Progress as an Ongoing Effort
It is also vital to remember that choosing marketing tactics is not a set-and-forget proposition. You must measure early and often to see that they bring the expected results. You don't want to wait until the end of the campaign only to realize that it underperformed and failed to achieve your objectives.
So, what's the solution? You must identify the metrics you will use to determine if the tactic is effective. Embed key performance indicators (KPIs) into the process early so you can see how well your tactics achieve your goals. If they are not working as well as you want, you can adjust your strategy based on the information you're collecting.
Use Audience Insights When Choosing Marketing Tactics for Reaching Your Goals
Marketing is a necessity for businesses of any size in any industry. It's even more critical for small or new businesses trying to grow their presence and build their customer base. However, getting the ROI for your marketing spend depends upon a clear understanding of the different marketing tactics, how to leverage them, and which is best for each goal.
When you want to know your marketing strategy is the right one to help your business reach its goals, you need an experienced partner with the right tools, technology, and expertise to help guide you. McClatchy, the second-largest local media company in the country, has it all. Our client partners have direct access to our unique audiences, local content sponsorships, and strategic digital tactics. When you are ready to take advantage of our 75 million+ unique digital visitors, 10 million+ monthly video views, and over 7 million combined social media followers, contact us to get started.
