How to Write a Marketing Strategy that Focuses on Growing Revenue

How do you write a marketing strategy? First it's important to know why you need one.

The lifeblood of every business is in its ability to attract buyers and convert them into happy, repeat customers. In fact, executives in large corporations these days are somewhat infatuated with indexes and scores that measure the likelihood for customers to return or to recommend others.

While some of these are great tools for measuring and benchmarking the marketing performance of your business, none of them can tell you much without first knowing what your marketing strategy is.

At the end of the day, marketing strategies for small business should focus on attracting new customers and creating a loyal following.

Marketing is about letting potential buyers know about your product or service. It goes hand in hand with sales. Marketing on the one hand creates awareness among potential customers, and opens opportunities for a business to sell its products or services. Sales, on the other hand, focuses on closing those opportunities by converting potential customers into actual customers.

Begin with the 4 Ps

To write a marketing strategy, start with the 4 Ps...

• Product
• Price
• Place
• Promotion

Product

For starters, explain why customers will want to buy and use your product or service. Is it a new innovation? Does it make their lives more convenient? Does it reduce costs or improve efficiency? What is it about your product or service that intrigues potential customer?

Price

Price is something so many small business owners and managers fail to plan well. But it's so critical you should study your pricing strategy and devise a clear plan when you write a marketing strategy. Often, business owners think that lower prices are the key to winning in business. That's not always true.

First of all, lower prices can send a message of low quality. Buyers are often willing to pay more if they believe they are getting higher quality. So lower prices can hurt the image of your business and product.

Secondly, as a buyer, you know how it feels when you see the price go up for a product or service. Even if it's a quality product, buyers don't usually take price increases positively. So it's harder to raise your prices if you start out too low.

Place

Location can on its own often be the sole factor for a business' success. Many successful businesses in fact win on location purely - they may not offer much in the way of good service, or their product may not be the best quality you can buy. Still, location does the trick of forgiving these businesses for their shortcomings in other aspects. Think of that hot dog stand that has so many customers simply because the vendor selected a great location. Place is a high priority in planning and writing marketing strategy.

If you run an online business - and even if you don't - the Internet is an integral part of your placement strategy. Potential buyers find you online, and they often learn about you online, before they head over to your store or office. Your website must be professional, and have winning strategy for search engine and email marketing. Equally important, your site needs to have a way to measure performance and results.

Promotion

Promotion is about creating awareness - getting to your customers and connecting with them. It's about advertising, word of mouth and creating a demand. There are many ways to do this, so it's important to develop and write a marketing strategy that maps out a clear plan that can produce the desired result.

One mistake many businesses make is that they fail to measure the results of their promotional efforts. I've seen so many businesses simply advertise in the Yellow Pages for example, without having any method to track where and how customers found out about them.

If only a fraction of your customers come to know about your business through the yellow pages, then that might not be money well spent. On the other hand, coupon offers and flyers or catalogs with promo codes are fantastic ways to track where your customers come from. The key is to track all of your promotional efforts to measure how effectively they convert interested shoppers into buyers.

Moving beyond the 4 Ps when you write a marketing strategy...

Apart from designing a clear strategy for each of the 4 Ps, your marketing plan needs to have a well conceived budget. Find out how much or how little your pricing, location and promotional strategies are going to cost you. Find out how much it's going to cost to develop the right packaging and design for your product. Find out how much it's going to cost to hire staff and resources to implement your plan.

Also set clear milestones for each project or goal within your marketing strategy, and assign each of them to the right person.

When you write a marketing strategy, it's more than just words on paper - it's a blueprint for generating revenue and building loyal customers for your business.

Back to top of page

Back to Create Marketing Plan Page from this Write Marketing Strategy Page