Why You Need a Marketing Communication Strategy

Once your business is up and running, you need to find a way to get customers. You can’t stand on the street all day asking people to visit your store, so it’s important to have a marketing communications strategy in place to get customers to come to you. Your business has competition, and with more businesses operating online than ever before, the competition is fierce.

A communications strategy allows you to outline your marketing plan without worrying about last-minute changes or stressors. It can also keep you organized so you can stay within budget. Here’s why a marketing communications strategy is a necessity for any business.

Builds Brand Trust

Customers need to trust your brand before they’ll start purchasing products from you. Communicating a consistent brand message is the first step to building trust between your customers and your business. Make sure the information you share across all of your marketing efforts remains consistent.

Your marketing strategy should also tell a story. Of course, you need to tell your story to the public via your website, but you can also build a public relations strategy by reaching out to journalists so they can help you increase brand awareness.

If you’re a B2B business, the way you build brand trust might look a little different. All businesses should use the same imagery, including logos, in their marketing, but B2B companies should also create their letterhead to create branded invoices.

Reach Your Audience

If you want customers to start buying your products, you’ll need to reach those potential customers. You can use a variety of marketing tactics to increase your brand awareness and reach the right people. Make sure you use both traditional and digital marketing techniques simultaneously so you can reach more people. Choosing one over the other means you might not reach as many people or generate as much buzz about your offerings as you’d like. By using both types of marketing simultaneously, they can support one another online and in person.

Before you start spending thousands of dollars on advertising and marketing, you should have an understanding of your audience. Then, you can build customer personas with any data you have on your current customer base to find the right marketing methods for them.

To conduct the necessary information on your audience, you should conduct market research, which can consist of:

• Surveys
• Interviews
• Focus groups

You should also use all of your analytics tools, such as Google Analytics or your Facebook insights, to get as much information as possible before you start marketing.

Increase ROI

Your marketing efforts mean nothing if you’re not getting a return on your investment. If you’re spending thousands of dollars for a single sale, then you’re not effectively marketing. Communication requires getting your customers’ attention while also finding ways to make them convert into paying customers.

When you craft a marketing strategy around sales promotions, you want to increase the sales of a product, so you’ll need to make sure you’re making money on every dollar you spend. Always measure your marketing efforts as best as you can so you can determine whether or not your marketing dollars are being spent wisely.

If you find your budget is not being spent wisely, stop spending money and take time to figure out what’s working and what isn’t. For example, you might find that sales haven’t increased after a billboard marketing campaign, but they have increased with a Google Ads campaign. This information allows you to determine what types of strategies to cut out of your overall communications strategy so you can put more money into the tactics that work. Or, if you are releasing a new product to the market you should conduct a EMC/EMI test to determine the compatibility with the environment before you spend your entire budget on it.

Make sure you collect as much data as you can on all of your marketing efforts so you can find out how much they cost. Your cost per acquisition (CPA) is going to be increasingly important as your business grows. For example, you may find that you’re able to convert prospects into customers for a lower CPA through email marketing, but it costs more money to get subscribers than it does to convert customers through Facebook marketing.

Can Help You Learn About Your Customers

By implementing a marketing strategy, you can learn more about your audience. If you don’t have any data on your customers and haven’t conducted market research, then you’re walking into a marketing campaign blind. Instead of making guesses about what your customers want to see from you, use your initial marketing campaigns as a way to learn more about your customers.

To learn more about your customers, spend your first marketing dollars trying something you’ve never done before. For example, try a Facebook Ads campaign and begin advertising to your customers. After your campaign is done, whether or not you had a significant ROI, you’ll be armed with data about your customers. You can learn about the types of people who visited your Facebook page, such as their age, gender, where they’re located, and other pages they like so you can target them more effectively next time.

Protects Your Reputation

An effective communications strategy can protect your reputation in many ways. There are various areas online where customers can leave reviews that will impact whether or not another customer decides to do business with you. For example, if you have horrible reviews on your website, then it’s unlikely that many people will continue to purchase from you after reading them.

You can build a reputation management strategy that gives you a plan for addressing bad reviews and negative sentiment about your business by building a communications strategy. You can easily improve your reputation by communicating with your customers and trying to resolve any issues they have so their reviews won’t impact another customer’s decision to make a purchase.

All businesses need a marketing communication strategy that builds brand awareness and allows them to manage their online and offline reputation. Your business reputation is everything. While you can get people to your business website, you can’t convert them as easily if they read bad reviews about your products or services. An effective communications strategy will cover all of your bases so you’re not left with a problem that can’t be resolved.