Five top tips for writing your marketing strategy

Making sales isn’t always easy, even when you have a great product. That’s why every business, big or small, needs a robust marketing strategy to define the customer journey that effectively markets and sells your product or service. 

Developing the right marketing strategy is essential if you want to drive sales, increase visibility and raise your profile. It provides a commercial focus and will help you identify customer needs and how your product or service fulfils those needs. 

Effective strategies set goals regarding the number of potential customers to be reached, the direction the sales and marketing should take, the budget needed, and a timeline for delivery of the plan. 

Taking the time to understand the marketplace from the customer’s perspective and steering your business in front of the right customers, using the appropriate channels where you can profitably compete. 

Your marketing strategy also ensures that everyone knows what you are trying to do, to what end and what they need to do.   

At Onyx Health, we have years of experience using healthcare marketing communications strategies to grow businesses by driving sales; you can find out more about the services we offer. To help businesses on their marketing journey, the OH team have pulled together five top tips for writing a marketing strategy to deliver maximum impact.  

1. New markets, new products, and greater market access  

This is the cornerstone of any effective marketing strategy. The exact approach adopted will depend on the business, the product, and the commercial objectives. This is likely to consist of three core elements:  

• Greater market penetration – growing your existing product in an existing market by increasing sales 
• New market launches – unlocking new commercial opportunities by launching your existing products or services into unexplored markets 
• Product diversification – launching a new product into a new market to expand your business commercial portfolio  

Businesses generally rethink their products and market access reactively, when there is little opportunity for growth in the existing market, or in response to market saturation. Proactive planning should be used to avoid this. It should be your top priority to get ahead of the game.  

2. It’s all about the bottom line 

Marketing strategies have an important role to play in sales and revenue generation. This effectively involves translating marketing activity into something that delivers tangible commercial benefits by increasing sales and revenue. Marketing activity does not always have a direct relationship with sales and may involve raising awareness and building credibility. However, this still may have an indirect commercial objective in that the goal of these activities is ultimately to increase revenue.  

3. Identify the right target market  

Getting the target market right enables your business to focus messages and marketing campaigns on a specific area tailoring and targeting your communication tactics for maximum impact. Depending on the company and the product concerned, this may involve targeting commercially relevant organisations from a B2B perspective and end-users from a B2C perspective.  An important part of this process is market segmentation, identifying specific demographics using behaviours, needs and attitudes to create brand user personas. These personas facilitate an understanding of how people relate to your product and service more effectively, which can be factored into marketing and communications activity.  

4. Be bold, be different and standout  

Having a clear differentiation and marketing positioning strategy is imperative for your business to stand out in a highly competitive marketplace. This involves focusing on a unique selling point for your products or services: this should be articulated through a series of phrases or messages to create something genuinely distinctive.  

5. Consider  digital-led customer engagement  

Simply sending an email or posting with a website link is not enough in today’s crowded digital marketing space. It’s about offering content that’s meaningful for your audience. Effective customer engagement is firstly about identifying the right target audiences to fulfil your commercial objectives. Once you know who you are talking to it’s about employing innovative, well researched and optimised communications to drive your audience to compelling content that offers users an experience based on interaction and participation. That’s why effective marketing strategies should be developed using multiple channels. 

The digital revolution has created opportunities for companies to use the latest augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technology to offer customers a uniquely immersive and truly differentiated digital experience. This gives companies the ability to craft a digital space in their image, without the limitations of traditional conferences or exhibition stands, potentially reaching a global audience. It can offer target audiences something genuinely distinctive and provide a more meaningful enhanced form of engagement. 

Get in Touch 

We’re always happy to chat with businesses about their marketing strategy; if this interests you, then drop us a line.   

Click for more information about our  or contact Onyx Health on 0191 640 3638, email us at enquiries@onyxhealth.com