Marketing Strategy

Simple dissects each step of the decision journey to develop a powerful, profitable marketing strategy.

Your brand is built, or tarnished, through every aspect of the customer experience delivered by your business. In other words, the attributes of your brand are defined by customer perception. If you desire to position yourself as the low cost leader, yet customers perceive you to be expensive, you have a serious positioning problem. 

Either you don't understand the frame of reference that your customers use, you aren't correctly communicating how your product or service is the lowest cost, your competitor research failed to account for competitive alternatives against which your customers compare your product or service, or you are targeting the wrong type of customers (those that don't perceive the value in your offer).

To differentiate from competitors, you must first understand customer perceptions and the decision journey. This begins with a customer insight survey. A typical insight survey will provide answers to these questions:

• What triggers the decision journey?
• Why is there a desire for change?
• Which categories and brands are considered and or evaluated?
• Which information sources exert influence during the decision journey?
• What are the most important decision criteria used by your target customers?
• How much value do your target customers perceive in your products/services and company relative to competitive alternatives?
• In what ways do your target customers enjoy, advocate, and bond with brands?

Simple Marketing Strategy focuses on four interdependent components:
Brand Building; New Customer Acquisition; Customer Loyalty Development; and Referral Source Cultivation.

Marketing tactics should be selected and applied for each component of the marketing strategy. It is important to recognize that your target audience and message will be different within each marketing strategy component. Your message, call to action, or offer must be tailored for the unique mindset of customers at each stage of the decision journey. Your marketing efforts become truly powerful when you synergize interdependent marketing tactics so that they build upon each other to achieve a sustained increase in sales. 

Simple Business Solutions delivers a tactical marketing plan that provides you with a week-by-week breakdown of activities and a monthly budget.

Outsource marketing plan execution to experts as much as possible. Insource only what you can execute flawlessly and consistently. When you outsource marketing services to a marketing company like Simple Business Solutions, it allows you to manage results and outcomes rather than daily task lists.

Marketing should be viewed as an investment. Like any investment, you should measure results and optimize performance. If a marketing tactic proves wildly successful in growing revenue, it may be prudent to increase your investment in that tactic. Similarly, if a marketing tactic is not performing well, Simple Business Solutions helps you identify the root cause, then determine whether it can be adjusted to improve its performance, or determine whether the tactic should be removed from the marketing plan. 

Prior to executing any tactical marketing plans, Simple works with you to determine how each component of the marketing plan will be tracked and measured. Now that's results-driven marketing.