A marketing strategy refers to a business’s overall game plan for reaching prospective customers and turning them into clients to purchase their products or services. A marketing strategy should align the Business strategy, Brand strategy, Marketing strategy and Sales strategy.
The marketing landscape has changed over the last 10 years, in fact it has changed dramatically within the last 3 years due to Covid. Stats show that as of February 2022, approximately 82.7 percent of the Australian population were active users on Facebook compared to just 58 percent in 2015!! How is that for drastic.
We noticed last year that it’s noisier out there, this makes sense as 67% of businesses are now using social media compared to 45% back in 2018. Therefore it takes a little bit longer (more touch points, more proof) and it’s a little bit harder to find and convert that perfect client now.
Latest reports are showing a 19% increase in cost to get one good lead accounting for a 91% increase in marketing spend across all industries, over a year.
There are so many more moving parts now once a potential client is in your sales funnel – you need to look at UX – the user experience and CX – the customer experience journey. As a result:
• Lead times can be longer and leads simply look “different” now.
• In the sales conversion process, customer’s expectations have changed and therefore your approach to closing a sale has to change too.
Not only has social media jumped onto the scene, the way in which we digest content now has also changed. Here are some important Australian statistics:
• YouTube – 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. The average user is on YouTube for 11 minutes and 24 seconds each day. A whopping 70% of what users watch is suggested by the YouTube algorithm.
• In Australia, 58.14% of users access the Internet through a desktop, 37.22% via a mobile phone and 4.14% via a tablet.
• There were 12,750,000 Linkedin users in Australia in January 2022, which accounted for 48.2% of its entire population.
• In 2022, Facebook will remain the most popular social media platform in Australia.
• In October 2022, Instagram is Australia’s second most-used social media platform.
Source: https://www.smperth.com/
But let’s not forget at the end of the day that it is “people” using these platforms. It’s very easy to get lost in all the stats and forget that especially since Covid, more than ever, people are looking to “CONNECT” again on a deeper level, with other humans.
How does this affect marketing strategy?
Some of the key themes coming through include “showing vulnerability”, “expressing Leadership,” “showing a personal side”. At the end of 2022 we saw that people were definitely “zoomed” out and ran back to face-to-face networking, live events, meetups, conferences, tradeshows and the like. It’s more important than ever we have found, to connect with people on a different and more personal level and take these strong relationships into business environments and into traditional and digital marketing campaigns in a completely different way.
So how does all this fit in with the 9 P’s?
Well, back in my day of study at QUT, if you remember, it was simply the 4 P’s -Product, Price, Place, Promotion. Life seemed so much easier. Of course, that was before the digital age and boy have things changed since then.
The first point we stress is alignment – ensuring you align all of these 9 P’s with your Business, Branding, Marketing and Sales strategies because, if you don’t do this when you are making any business or future marketing decisions, you can completely derail what you are trying to achieve; and we are seeing this a lot in the marketplace right now.
Here I share the 9 P’s of Strategic Marketing – now if you are keen to deep dive into each of these a little more, click through here and join our mailing list and we’ll not only drip feed you great hints and tips related to each one, you will also have the opportunity to get a great deal on the newly released Branding, Marketing and Closing the Sale Workbooks releasing soon (valued at $4500) – Deep dive here
Need help with your Marketing Strategy? It’s our specialty, reach out today on 0438765718 or email michelle@ohmarketing.com.au to book in your complimentary review.
