As a small- or medium-sized business, you’re likely always on the lookout for affordable yet effective ways to promote your products or services. What if we told you that you can achieve great things by simply communicating your brand’s message to your target audience instead of explicitly trying to sell something?
For this to work, however, you need a solid marketing communication strategy. Wondering how you can create a marketing communication strategy that’s customer-centric, data-driven, on-brand – and delivers the results you want? Let’s find out.
Marketing Communication Strategy: What Is It, Exactly?
As one of the most successful inbound marketing strategies, a marketing communication strategy is a plan that companies put in place in order to highlight their value to a target audience. Typically, it would contain the following four elements:
- Your audience: This is the section of the market that you’re planning on targeting. You need to know demographic details – age, location, average income, and so on – as well as behaviour and interests.
- Your message: What exactly are you trying to tell your audience through your marketing messages and campaigns? Remember: you’re not aiming for a hard sell, but a natural, authentic, and value-packed interaction between you and your potential customers.
- Your channels of choice: After you have crafted the right marketing content to target the right audience, you’ll need to decide how to put it out into the world. To pick the best channels and platforms, consider where your audience hangs out the most, and what type of content they prefer to consume – from blog posts to banner generation and social media content.
- Your timing: The content of your message is crucial, but so is the timing. For your marketing communication strategy to work, you’ll want to know when the best times to send your message are, as this is going to massively help your ROI.
Build a Winning Marketing Communication Strategy in Five Steps
Now, let’s get into the meat of things: discover how you can create a stellar marketing communication strategy for your small or medium business in just five simple, actionable steps.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
As we have just seen, your audience is the first pillar of any marketing communication strategy, and that’s exactly where you want to start. To clarify who you want to target, consider creating an ideal customer persona.
To achieve this, collect data from your current audience and try to establish things such as age, gender, location, profession, education level, and more. Remember to look at behavioural details, too, such as buying patterns, lifestyle, interests, and pain points. If you don’t have the staff, consider using an external agency or automation to help.
2. Define Clear and Measurable Goals
Assuming that all you want to achieve through your marketing campaigns is to simply “sell more” is a common misconception – and a mistake you don’t want to make. There are, in fact, a lot more goals that your small business might want to accomplish: boost your social media following to build a real community, offer deals and discounts to your most loyal customers, increase your email list, and so on.
So, try to work out what exactly you are planning to accomplish with your strategy, and make sure you are as specific as possible. To this effect, you may want to follow the famous SMART method, which encourages you to set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
3. Find (and Maintain) Your Brand Identity
If you want your marketing message to sound relevant, authentic, and valuable, you need to keep it on-brand. But before you keep it on-brand, you need to clarify some key branding elements: what is your identity? What is your brand personality? In what tone of voice do you communicate? What values do you uphold? What are your mission and vision?
Once you have identified all the above, you should be ready to craft content that matches your unique company, and that your current and potential customers can instantly recognise in a sea of competing brands.
4. Select the Best Channels
Whilst you might be tempted to spread your marketing message far and wide, the truth is that it’s best to start simple. Write up a list of the main marketing channels your company is currently using to interact with its audience – usually, these would be things like blogs, social media, and email. Make sure to factor in your SEO efforts too.
Then, take a look at how each channel is performing. You’ll almost certainly notice some of them seem to be doing significantly better than others, and that will help you figure out where to focus your efforts.
For example, let’s imagine you are a SaaS company promoting an alternative to RingCentral. Right now, chosen communication channels are Facebook, your blog, and email newsletters. After analysing the stats for each of these channels, you realise that the one coming out first is your blogs.
This is a clear indicator that your audience is loving your blogs, and that’s the channel you should focus on boosting and refining. Of course, this doesn’t mean dropping the others entirely, but re-priorisation is certainly in order.
5. Regularly Measure and Assess Your Strategy
In order to be effective, all business processes should be based on clean, current, and accurate data. This applies to anything from HR (by using solutions such as Oleeo’s data-driven recruitment) to, of course, sales and marketing.
Therefore, if you want your marketing communication strategy to be a success, you need to keep checking on its performance, analysing its strongest and weakest points, and improving when necessary.
In parallel, remember to also keep a close eye on market trends, market expectations, and the broader customer journey that your brand offers.
Some of the best key performance indicators you’ll want to track to figure out the effectiveness of your plan include:
- Website traffic and conversion rates
- Customer engagement rates on social media channels
- Response rates on email marketing
- Online sales
Wrapping Up
Relying on a robust marketing communication strategy can help take your small or medium business to new heights – but to come up with such a strategy, a bit of initial work is required.
From identifying your goals, creating accurate buyer personas, and picking the right communication channels – all the way to constantly monitoring and assessing your strategy, there is a lot to do! It will all pay off in good time. Follow the five tips outlined in our guide, and get ready to see your small business accomplish great things!
