No Marketing Strategy? 9 Ways You are Hurting your Business

Do you really need a Marketing Strategy?

In this modern age, if your business is not on social media, that’s a fishy sign. This is why a lot of business owners now would create social media profiles on ALL channels once they start their businesses without thinking for a second to conduct a marketing strategy or consult a marketing expert for a 30 min. call.

One mistake they do is that their efforts stop at this point. A lot of business owners wouldn’t care much about having a marketing or social media strategy, and just prefer to randomly post whenever the mood strikes.

Having a strategy is like a blueprint for your marketing and social media efforts. It helps plan, execute, track and develop your marketing and business more clearly. Which in time would increase sales and help you gain new opportunities.

Not having a defined strategy for your marketing WILL hurt your business, here are 9 ways how.

1- You’re Not Properly Competing

To be able to be part of a competitive market, you need to conduct proper market research. This allows you to understand what each of your competitors is doing. And what you should be doing better in business or marketing for your potential clients, to have an edge over your competitors.

what if your competitor is amazon? Are you ready for the challenge?

2- You Are Missing on Potential Target Audience

One of the most common things that business owners tend to overlook is targeting the right target audience. Some tend to target EVERYBODY, which is not wise (or possible). Or will target a specific group and leave out some overlook other potential clients for the lack of proper research.
Specifying the audience (or personas) will enable you to talk to the right people and send the right message across your marketing channels. It will determine your tone of voice, the right channels to be on, as well as most of the marketing efforts.
In-depth research will allow you to access the right market and make impacts with your brand if you fulfill their needs.

Failing to target the right audience will impede developing your business or solving your client’s pain points which will drop the value of your product/service.

3- No Clear Goals

What do you wanna achieve in your business? What do you reach by posting on social media?
Do those goals align?

Posting aimlessly gets you nowhere. However, a strategy gives you clarity and helps determine the right action plan to reach your goals.

For example, if your business is just new, then your goal for social media should be brand awareness. If you keep posting random posts when no one really knows anything about your business, that could be counterproductive.
If you’re looking to increase your sales when you first start your business, you’re not allowing your clients through the marketing funnel. You’re just skipping so many steps.

Your message should be clear. It should support your business goals. Otherwise, you risk wasting energy and time, not to mention how it will confuse the audience.
A strategy will help you determine the content that will reinforce your goals. It will also help easily track the results to make sure your efforts are paying off.

4- Sharing the Wrong Content

Are you posting the same thing over and over again?
Do you always promote your product/service and spamming your followers with sales posts?
Are you posting just for the sake of posting?

Having no strategy means posting the wrong content, at the wrong time, in the wrong channel.

Conducting thorough research will allow you to figure out the type of content you should be sharing. Figuring out the right type of content will enable you to plan your calendars ahead of time. It will support diversifying content to appeal to your right audience by sharing relevant posts and promoting your business subtly.

With a strategy, you will be able to plan and schedule posts in advance by having a social media calendar. This saves time to allow more creativity which will help in developing your work. It also helps in sticking to social media rule number one: posting consistently.

5- Wasting Money

Without a strategy, you are leaving a lot of money on the table. You won’t be able to reach your target audience without paying tons of money in advertisements.

Having a strategy will determine the right pricing for your service/product based on the market research you made. Knowing the right audience, channel, and competitors will help you reach your audience organically and will determine how much to budget for your marketing and/or advertising, and how much revenue should you expect to be generated.

6- Wasting Time

Sitting blank not sure what to post? Having a lot of time wasted without posting consistently?

A strategy helps to create content ahead of time and gives you some ideas for what to post which will naturally increase productivity and saves a lot of time.

7- Hurt by Amateur Marketing

You may think you don’t need a marketing professional, anybody can post on social media, right?

Wrong!

Having a professional set up a strategy for your business can make a world of difference. Consulting with someone who knows what is the best practice when it comes to social media and marketing will save you time and money.

If you feel overwhelmed managing your social media, doing all you can but with no results. A professional market will help you get the results faster and with less money (even if you had to pay them more).

Some times you may need to hire a team, not just one person doing everything if your business allows it.

8- Can’t Measure Success

If you don’t have a plan, you probably don’t have clear goals to measure. Neither actionable KPIs to properly track metrics provided by the platforms or google analytics.

A strategy is critical to understanding the success of each business and its social media activity to be able to successfully plan the future.

Defined KPIs for demographics, engagement and conversion factors will help create campaigns to establish a benchmark for future planning and measurement. It will determine the quality of your content or followers to become clients and will help in planning future social media posts.

9- Hurting the brand

If you don’t have a properly written social media strategy, your brand will appear noncoherent and will look lacking any direction. You will seem unclear of any plan or knowing what you’re doing which will be evident from all your activities on social media.

A strategy helps you stay on brand and utilizes how professional your brand looks. It sends a clear message about your values and your consistency.

A well thought of post gives the feeling of a quality business. It keeps your story and promises clear to your clients with a general cohesive look and feel.

Wanna learn marketing basics? Here is Everything you Need to Learn About Marketing your Startup