Setting Goals

The first step of the process is to set goals for your marketing. Goals are usually set at both one-year and three-year increments, so we can start to imagine what the roadmap to success looks like for you and your business. Goals usually consist of revenue targets and business growth like being able to hire more staff or move into a new, bigger premises. 

As well as revenue and business growth, we encourage business owners to think about how a successfully implemented marketing strategy can help them be more satisfied with life in general – many business owners are too time-poor to consider going on holiday, or working reduced hours. A successful marketing strategy can not only make a big difference to your business, but to your personal life, too. 

Unique Selling Point(s)

Outlining what makes your business stand out from your competitors is crucial, so we can start to conceptualise what your content strategy is going to look like. By gaining an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your business, and those of your competitors, as well as the elements of your service or product offering that resonate best with your clients or customers, we begin to lay the foundations of your marketing strategy. 

Market (Target)

Next up is audience analysis – defining your niche and who your business naturally attracts. 

Some businesses have broader audiences than others, but the important thing to understand here is that there is always a core demographic that will resonate most strongly to your product or service. If you can identify who they are, what they like and where they tend to spend their time, you can start to advertise to them effectively. 

Market segmentation and target market analysis rely on understanding the need that you are fulfilling, or the problem you are solving. This can be a practical solution or an emotional one – and sometimes both!

Its not uncommon for a business to have more than one target market, either. You may well uncover an audience of untapped potential that a solid marketing strategy can unlock for you. 

Messaging

In the fourth step we discuss our message – how do we evoke the feeling in your potential customers that they should consider your product or service? 

Your message is about more than just the words you use – its about your brand and the style you represent yourself with, your customer service experience, and the type of media that your audience prefers to consume – for example, do they prefer promotional video content or informational industry articles? Did we find they were making an emotional decision to buy from you, or a practical one? How do we best display your unique selling points in an impactful way that will resonate? 

Media Selection

Taking everything we have learned about your business so far, we now need to use that information to choose the right media to advertise with. 

There has never been more choice in the advertising industry for different media channels, and whether a particular channel will work for you entirely depends on the type of user that media channel tends to attract. 

We also have to think about whether that media channel is going to offer us the opportunity to utilise the type of content we feel will resonate with our audience. If using a visual medium is our best bet, radio isn’t going to be very useful – but if we have short & sharp messaging to deliver in a timely manner, radio could be a wise choice.

Once we’ve completed this step, the bulk of the work (for you) is done!

Implementation

Now we go away and put together a marketing strategy based on all of the information that came out of the previous five steps of the process. This will be a fully costed marketing strategy covering the next 12 months, with expected results defined for each individual channel. 

Because we’ve been doing all of this business analysis with you, it’s unlikely that there will be any surprises in the marketing strategy we present, but we do like to bring the whole ADhesive team in at this stage and see if anyone has any outside-of-the-box ideas that you could benefit from. 

Once you’ve approved the marketing strategy, we get to work on implementing your marketing campaigns. 

Tracking

Remember way back at the start when we set goals for our marketing to achieve? Well, we need to make sure we’re hitting them! The marketing campaigns we put in place will be tracked and results will be delivered to you at the end of every campaign or monthly depending on the campaign type. We keep a close eye on how we’re tracking towards success and use this data to optimise our strategy, make changes where necessary, and ensure everything is going in the right direction. 

At the end of the first 12 months, with your first set of goals smashed and year-two ahead, we’ll do an annual review with you to get up to date with how everything is going within the business and to outline any changes in strategy for the following twelve months.