Expanding the image of your brand, increasing the interest people have in your company and boosting sales and profit is the main objectives of an online marketing strategy. These should be your number one concerns when analyzing the success of your marketing strategy.

But what about the marketing strategy itself. How do you optimize your marketing strategy in order to accomplish these common goals? I would like to share some optimization tips with you that you can use and implement in your next strategy. These tips will help you increase your chances of running a successful strategy, and will help you create a more streamlined strategy.

1. Effective and clear communication

The first thing you need to do to ensure your strategy is adequate is to ensure that your message is clear and effective. Make sure that your readers will easily understand what your message is about, and what you can offer them. The clearer your message, the more targeted your audience.

2. Target your audience

If you don’t know who you’re targeting, then you won’t be able to reach the right audience. Do proper research before launching your marketing campaign. Examine your competition and discover your target audience. By knowing who to target, you will be able to have a much more successful strategy. Your marketing costs will also decrease and you will be able to direct your campaign to the right people.

3. Use all your options

Online marketing can consist of a large variety of options, platforms, mediums and more. You should analyze your competition and determine all options available to you. Use all of the relevant options that can help you boost the success of your marketing campaign.

Your options might include SEO, blogging, social media marketing, link building, press release distribution, etc. Find out what works for your competition and you will know what options will work for you.

4. Research and improve

Once you have a strategy in place, you should do some research and improve your strategy in any way that you can.

Planning your initial approach to your strategy takes a lot of time, and can hold errors and issues. This is why you need to go through everything, research all aspects of your strategy and analyze your competition. By doing this, you’ll be able to easily identify problem areas in your online marketing strategy, and fix them before launching your strategy and wasting money.

5. Analyze the results

Once you’ve launched your online marketing strategy, you should closely analyze the results it’s bringing. Draw regular reports and analyze the results your online marketing campaign is bringing you. Once your campaign has been running for a couple of days, you should also look out for any part of your online marketing campaign that’s not performing as expected – try to adjust these parts of the campaign to improve your results.

Conclusion

Online marketing is a serious task. You need to work hard, do your research and take the time to set up a proper plan for your online marketing campaign. This will help you build a better brand for your business, drive more traffic and land more sales. By utilizing the five tips I mentioned here, you should be able to see an improvement in your online marketing strategy.

A Marketing strategy is crucial if you want to really succeed in your marketing. Amongst its advantages are:

1. Helping you to focus your marketing attention.

2. Better complete utilization of resources

3. Helps in increasing sales; and

4. A powerful resource of winning over your competitors.

Every company applies some kind of marketing strategies to maintain existing customers, attract potential customers and also to maintain and enhance their reputation in the market.

When designing a marketing plan, first a marketing strategy is taken into consideration. The marketing plan consists of steps to be taken so as to attain success in the implementation of the marketing strategy chosen. Big projects involve selection of different strategies at different levels. Usually a strategy consists of well-sketched tactics. They are meant to meet the needs and finally reach marketing objectives.

Each of the strategies has pre-calculated results because when a particular strategy is chosen at a particular level, its outcome becomes the goal of that particular level. If there is an absence of a well thought out strategy in a marketing plan it means it is supposedly lacking a good foundation. A reasonable marketing strategy should not only facilitate marketing goals, but also the action sequence of a campaign.

At regular time intervals the firm should analyze the marketing decision. This is done with the help of strategic models. The 3C’s model is usaully considered for this purpose. The 3C’s model determines the factors, which leads to the success of a marketing campaign.

There are three key parties involved in this model. These are:

>>> The corporation

>>> The customer; and

>>> The competitors.

The involvement of all the three key parties leads to positive results and this involvement is known as the 3C’s or strategic triangle.

The role of the corporation is to increase the strength of the company in the success critical areas, when compared to that of the competitor. The customer and his interest form the basis of any strategy. The competitor also plays a vital part. The competitor-based strategies are based on the functioning of business competitors like design and engineering, sales and servicing, and purchasing.

When making a marketing plan some particular strategies known as mix strategies are used. 4P’s model is used to calculate whether the plan is sticking to the strategies or not.

The four Ps stand for product, price, place and promotion. Products are goods produced by the company on a huge scale for the purpose of selling them and earning profit. Price is the money paid for a product by the customer. The price is based on many factors like competition, market share, customer perception and product identity. Place where the product is sold can be either physical store or store on the Internet. It is also known as distribution channel. To make the customer knowledgeable about a product, the marketer does promotion. It involves advertising, public relation and point of sale.

There are different types of marketing strategies based on some criteria. Some of the common marketing strategies are:

1. Market dominance strategies – Market dominance strategies are used to dominate the market. Examples of these are Challenger, Leader and Follower.

2. Porter generic strategies – Porter generic strategies are built on strategic strength or competing abilities and strategic scope or market penetration. Cost leadership, Market segmentation and Product differentiation are types of porter generic strategies.

3. Innovation strategies – Innovation strategies are meant to trigger the rate of product development and model innovation. It helps you as a business to incorporate latest technologies. Close followers, late follower and Pioneers are types of innovation strategies.

4. Growth strategies – Growth strategies facilitate the growth of the organization. Intensification, Diversification, Vertical integration and Horizontal integration are types of growth strategies.

5. Marketing warfare strategies are conjunction of marketing strategies and military strategies.

A marketing strategy or a mix of them is chosen only after thorough market research. A marketer should always be ready to face any kind of situations like if the strategy is changed in the middle, he should be able to perform another market research so as to choose the proper strategy, within a short period of time. This can be done easily if you have the experience.

1). Make the purpose clear
37Signals has made the art of simple in software, simple in pricing, simple in use, simple in hiring and the clear purpose the business exists. Take this extract from their stated values “Useful is forever – Bells and whistles wear off, but usefulness never does. We build useful software that does just what you need and nothing you don’t.”

2). Define the Marketing strategy, Work with it and don’t just state it
The first step in bringing your strategy to work is to figure out what it really means to you. Many people would look at 37Signals software maker and discover that their marketing strategy is to develop functional software with low cost and deliver in several versions with a 30-day free trial. A quicker check would show their actual marketing strategy is simplicity in everything.

3). Turn it into a mantra question
So, if you’ve developed a marketing strategy and now realize you can bring it to life by way of a defining characteristic, you might be wondering how to drive it deeper into the organization.

The only way for your real business strategy to flourish is to make it an integral aspect of everything you do. The simplest way to do this is to use it as the leading question for every service, product, staff, customer, marketing decision and process. The questions you must ask are: Does this product inspire? Does this decision keep fun alive? Is this process simple? Does this new hire value community? Is this pricing convenient?

4). Produce strategy scorecards
In addition to creating the key word question, teaching how to think with strategy and using strategy filters for decision making, you have to find ways to keep real strategy working in day to day activities of your business.

One of the best ways to do this is to turn strategy thinking into a game. Create scorecards that reward people for thinking, employing and acting with marketing strategy. If, in the case of a company where entertainment and surprise are the major characteristics of market strategy, bonus points could be awarded for taking action that exceeded a customer’s expectations, or for chairing a meeting that was both fun and productive.

5). Build strategy filters
In order for your marketing strategy to reach full potential, it must be the filter your entire staff uses for their work with each other, advisers, suppliers and clients. It is good to build a process that staff members can use when planning a project or even action step. This simple process lets them to view anything they choose in the light of strategy impact and either change course or know for certain that they are taking real strategy action.

Lots of start-up tries to decide the perfect business strategy to use to market only to discover that the market does not require the model they are about to use. Any business plan for that matter, is little more than a guess and I believe that your best chance for getting that guess right is to build your business model.

This assumes the role a fully developed market actually should play in determining the direction of an organization. The fact is, most people, if they consider marketing strategy at all, stop at a core message, identity elements and perhaps a sales proposition and call it a strategy.

A marketing strategy is how you plan to use the resources available to you to build an ongoing case that your business, products and services are the obvious choice for a narrowly defined ideal customer. If you accept this expanded view of marketing strategy, then I would suggest you answer the following questions in an attempt to measure where your strategy stands today, and where it could go if you understood and integrated it fully as your business model.