Promoting a brand, product or service with limited marketing resources is a difficult challenge. We've been working with the University of Brighton's Green Growth Platform for the past few years, hosting regular free workshops to their members, to help give them the tools to execute a great marketing campaign on a low budget.
One practice that we use to put together a marketing strategy for all of our clients, as well as advise in our workshops, is "POST".
What goes into a POST marketing plan?
P | People
Who are you trying to target?
Every successful business is centered around solving a pain point for people. However, in order to reach the people with the pain, you need to know who they are and how you can reach them.
When we talk about ‘people’ at the start of a strategy, what we’re really doing in “official marketing terms” is creating different ‘audience segments’.
The more detail you can go into on who you’re trying to target, the more creative you can get with the messaging - and the lower the risk of alienating people.
The most effective marketing strategies identify and target between 3 and 5 different ‘personas’, painting a picture of them with the following types of data:
Age
Gender
Location
Occupation
Routine (specifically relationship commitments and work patterns)
Buying habits (what they choose to spend their money on)
Views (political, sociological and other topics important to them)
O | Objective
What are you trying to achieve?
'Marketing' is an open ended practice. There are so many different ways that a product, service or brand can be marketed, but the most ineffective campaigns are those who spread their efforts too thinly.
This is where separating your marketing efforts by campaign objectives is vital. Firstly, it enables you to keep your "eyes of the prize" through the campaign, but it also acts as a pinnacle through the strategy planning stages to help you keep on mission.
And you need to be specific: How many more sales do you want? How much higher would you like your reach or engagement to be? How many more site visitors or social media followers do you want?
S | Strategy
How are you going to achieve it?
This is when you start really getting into the creative thinking through identifying the messages that would both speak to your audience and help you to meet your objective.
The best marketing plans include a range of different ways that you can do this.
Examples of strategies that would be implemented include educating the audience on your industry, directly selling your product, highlighting certain aspects of your product, and building or supporting a community to promote brand awareness.
T | Tactics
Which tools will you use?
Here's where you get into the details and map out which platforms you're going to use for getting these messages out there - with a big focus on where your target audience are.
For instance, if you're trying to promote discounts to certain organisations, it can be most effective to flyer outside of their building. Alternatively, if you're trying to sell a type of food to families across the UK, Google display ads would be better practice.
You can use a range of different tactics per strategy.
Or you can contact us and we can run them for your business