One of the keys for your startup to work is to have a solid and effective marketing strategy. Thanks to this, you will be able to communicate and position your company’s brand, increasing the sales of your products or services.
There are many advantages offered by using marketing strategies. For example, we have already mentioned that it allows you to increase sales, but it also helps to get to know your target audience better, stand out from the competitors in an increasingly saturated market, boost your company’s projection, build customer loyalty…
In La Lonja de la Innovación’s Acceleration Program we have the help and advice of Abraham Villar, digital marketing mentor with more than 11 years of experience, who advises and guides startups in their strategies. But in this post we leave you some essential pieces of advice for any company and entrepreneur.
The previous steps
Before choosing which strategies are you going to use, there are three important steps you must complete: analyze the market, set your objectives and set the budget.
- Analyze the market. In this step you must study everything that surrounds your business, that is, identifying your target audience, your competition and the situation from which your company starts. It is recommended, and practically obligatory, to make a SWOT analysis in which you can specify what your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats are. In this way, by having a general picture of the market and your company, you can more easily establish what to focus your strategy on, depending on your main necessities.
- Set your objectives. The marketing strategy must start from the objectives you want to achieve with your company, this is why one of the first steps is to know what your goals are and, for this, it is recommended to use the famous acronym SMART, which states that they must be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound.
- Set your budget. You can’t carry out any strategy without knowing how much money you are willing to invest in it. By this way, you will know your limits and you will be able to better focus the actions to be executed.
Once you have done all of the above, you are ready to define the strategies you are going to use to achieve your objectives. Here is where you must set the action lines to follow and the resources you will need. Thus, depending on the necessities of your company and the objectives you have set, you must select which strategy or strategies are best suited to your business.
Digital marketing
Taking into account that the Internet is currently the main protagonist in our daily lives, digital marketing is one of the star strategies for any company. This consists of focusing the commercial actions on digital media instead of the traditional ones, since the latter have lost popularity. In this way, your business must have an online presence or, otherwise, you will not generate a good image to your audience and because, in addition, this will bring you an infinity of benefits.
In this sense, consider using social networks as a channel for dissemination and promotion of your contents, create a webpage for your business and use SEO positioning, do content marketing and email marketing, etc. Nowadays, the Internet offers uncountable possibilities when it comes to carrying out a marketing strategy with the advantage that they are usually low-cost and, in addition, measurable.
Lastly, you should keep in mind that marketing is constantly evolving, so it is important to be aware of the latest trend so you can adapt to changes and not be left behind.