Simple Marketing Part 7: Pull it all together

So far the Simple Marketing series has asked you to do a lot of thinking about your business which is essential before you begin to build or review your marketing strategy.

At this point its time to reflect on everything you have found out about your business and start to create a list of priorities. This is useful, because its impossible to do everything at once and by sorting your actions into priorities you will be focusing your time on the most important actions first.

Again this will help to determine the marketing stategy for your business.

The difficulty here for me being able to tell you how to decide on your priorities for your business, particulalrly because no two businesses are the same.

But for example, if you have found that your sales are declining and your costs rising clearly your marketing strategy will need to be developed to counter this.

Yet this would immediately suggest a strategy to boost sales at the same time as one to cut costs. You would then need to take time to look at your customer base and draw on all the other information you have to help you decide the most appropriate way to tackle this.

Likewise if you found sales were increasing but profit decreasing you would firstly need to identify why this was the case, for example you could be trading in a highly competitive marketplace and the only way to win sales is to invest heavily in promotions and advertising. In this instance one of your key priorities would be to look for alternative more cost effective ways to win sales. This could then lead you to look at pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimisation and eMail marketing as ways to help you incresase sales but keep costs under control.

Overall at this stage the most important thing to do is review everything you have learnt from the previous 6 steps, and list your key priorities. Don’t be afraid to get a second opinion of your thinking to sense check your findings.

Once you have finalised your list you have in place the foundations of your marketing strategy.