If I asked you if you were engaged in strategic marketing, you’d probably say, “Yes, of course I am.” But strategic marketing is more than just finding your audience and marketing to them.
Strategic marketing involves using strategic thinking to see how what you do is different from what your competitors do. And it involves using creativity to invent a new service offering that you can coin as uniquely yours so you will have less competition selling it. Piece of cake, right?
Not really. But there are only a few ways to truly rise above your competition. You can go head-to-head offering the same things they do, only try to do it better. Lots of businesses take this approach. Some with success, some without.
You can try to out-market your competition — be more visible, more of a leader, a stronger networker. But this approach can be time consuming and it often attracts only one customer at a time. Not the kind of sales volume you’re looking for, I imagine.
True strategic marketing finds ways to set you apart from your competition so that you are essentially offering a different product or service than they are. You are no longer going after just a piece of the business pie, you’ve created a new pie all for yourself.
How?
Setting yourself apart from your competition is a creative exercise. It requires the courage to question how you do what you do and the openness to do it differently. And that’s not a small thing. People tend to follow what others in their industry are doing. Doing so feels safe and it takes courage to step outside of that and bring something new to the marketplace.
Ask yourself, could you collect all your services into one comprehensive service? Could you break it up into smaller micro services? Could you deliver your services differently? Is there anything you can do to make what you do more convenient for the customer? Could you price what you do differently? Is there anything that you can do that the others are not doing at all? Could you bundle your services into packages that serve different types of needs?
Most strategic marketing campaigns involve naming a service offering — or coining a catch phrase that makes it memorable and helps people distinguish it from other options in the market — before you engage in marketing it. And how well or poorly you do the naming can influence the success you experience when marketing it substantially. But the key is to do it. And to make what you do NOT a subtle difference but a significant difference. If what you do to set yourself apart is subtle and inconsequential to the customer, it will not get their attention or motivate them to act. It’s the primary reason that naming is so often necessary — to add drama to the offering and attract attention and a fresh perspective to it.
Now, actively market it.
Even the best named and most unique service offerings need marketing to back them up. You have to budget some marketing dollars, time and effort to get the word out and promote your new service offering.
How you do that is a whole different blog post, but suffice it to say for now, that marketing through email, direct mail, your website, blog posts, social media, trade shows, trade pubs and speaking engagements is how you do it. And all these activities are much easier when you offer something your customers can’t get elsewhere.
Good luck and enjoy the pie.
— Chris Quinn, principal and brand strategist
Photo by Mykl Roventine on Flickr. Some rights reserved
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