3 Fundamental Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses
July 12, 2021
Where is your marketing strategy taking you? You need a 30k-foot view of your destination before you actually start your campaigns.
Many businesses don’t engage in high-level strategic planning when they start marketing. They want to jump right into goals and tactics — and even more problematic — go right into the execution of campaigns.
But you can find yourself in deep, unfriendly waters when you start to execute without really understanding why you’re acting. This mistake sinks a lot of businesses.
This post will help you avoid that mistake.
What is a high-level marketing strategy?
Your high-level marketing strategy is a vision of how you’ll fit into the market you plan to target. This view is more speculative and assumptive. It serves as an antecedent to the actual goals, tactics and execution you develop later.
High-level strategy orients you in the marketplace, impacting how you’ll discover target audiences and compare yourself to the competition.
Imagine you’re planning a trip. A high-level marketing strategy is similar to knowing where you plan to go.
If you’re going to the Himalayas to trek, you’ll plan differently than if you’re going to Cancun to lounge on the beach. That decision changes your timing, preparation and response to the environment.
In marketing, there are three fundamental high-level strategies to consider.
Strategy #1: You’ve developed a new solution to a clearly identified problem
We start with what is the best — but rarest — place to develop a marketing strategy. You’ve identified a problem a significant target audience has and created a new solution that solves that problem.
In this case, you’re the first out the gate. You saw the problem people needed to solve and created a solution before anybody else.
The key here is that people recognize they have the problem. This is not a “solution in search of a problem,” but rather a known issue that won’t require much education or persuasion to convince the audience of their need.
For example, I’m an avid bicyclist, but one downside of biking is getting flat tires.
In recent years, companies developed a sealant product you can put into your tubes that seals a puncture before the tire goes flat.
This is a great idea, but still, there was the cumbersome problem of having to fill the tube with the sealant. I had a few situations where it wouldn’t work on the type of tube I was using.
But I found a new product that completely solves this problem. It’s a tube that comes with the sealant already in it.
This product makes perfect sense and solves a problem I was acutely aware of. When I realized it was available, I didn’t hesitate to buy it.
This first strategic position is in one way the most difficult, and in another way the easiest to start out with.
The difficult part is the discovery. You have to identify a problem that doesn’t have a current solution, and then develop one people will respond to. Many entrepreneurs go their entire professional lives without hitting this type of “big idea.”
However, if you do hit on a big idea, you have a product that is easiest to market. When it becomes recognized that there is a solution to an active problem many people have, word spreads. These are the kinds of products that seem to market themselves.
Before you can even think about setting goals or executing tactics, you have to come up with the idea in the first place.
But if you uncover a winner, you’re in the best possible marketing position moving forward.
Strategy #2: You have a new product to offer, but you have to make people want it
The second high-level strategy is when you have a new product idea you can develop, but it is not dealing with an active need consumers are currently aware of.
In this case, your marketing must create the need for the product. You have to educate and persuade people that your offer will be beneficial to them.
The majority of new business innovations fall into this type of strategy because it’s easier to come up with a new idea that’s not necessarily rooted in a known, active problem people need to be solved. Of course, the idea has to be plausible, but you have more flexibility in terms of its possibilities.
This is, in many ways, the opposite of the first strategy. It’s easier to come up with the idea, but you face much greater marketing challenges connecting with your target audience.
There are many ways this strategy comes into play. You may be looking to start a new trend. For example, this site sells open-toe sneakers:
As a “new breed of shoes,” this business has the task of convincing people that an open-toe sneaker is desirable. They can educate consumers on the comfort but are most likely to experience success if they can tap into a small market of influencers who can start a trend to wear their product.
In this case, you have to move through the product adoption cycle, where you tap into innovators then move the product towards early adoption. Today, many businesses start by tapping into the early adopter audience on crowdsourcing sites, like Kickstarter.
The undisputed master of this high-level strategy is Apple. Steve Jobs had a gift for recognizing how technology could be used to take consumers to places that had not yet been imagined. He said:
“You’ve gotta start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology, you can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to sell it…it starts by asking: what incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?
Not starting with, let’s sit down with the engineers, and figure out what awesome technology we have, and then how are we going to market that. And I think that’s the right path to take.”
Only 20 years ago, nobody knew they needed a smartphone. Apple’s products and marketing message literally created that need.
Educating people on a need they’re not aware of, setting trends and establishing a brand are marketing’s core. It’s where the magic happens.
As you consider your high-level strategy with a new product idea, be absolutely certain you distinguish between these first two.
If you move into your campaigns thinking people will recognize why they should want your product when in fact they do not, the rest of your marketing will miss the mark.
It’s a common mistake you must avoid before you formalize a strategy or set any goals for your business.
Strategy #3: Competing in an existing market
The first two strategies are sometimes referred to as “blue ocean” strategies. In both cases, you’re creating an innovative offer to develop a new market. Your main challenges are in reaching and persuading your audience. Direct competition is not as relevant an issue.
In the third high-level strategy, this is not the case. Here, you develop a product where the need is known by consumers, and there is competition already in play, providing a solution.
As opposed to the clear blue oceans, you’re swimming in a pool of sharks.
The disadvantage here is that you have to be prepared to fight it out with the competition. Most of your marketing and advertising must work in response to the reality that consumers have other options.
The advantage is that you’re entering a market where you know people actually buy the type of product you’re offering.
With our first two strategies, you have the formidable challenge of having to discover if people will actually pay money for your product. That’s never a certainty, even when you think you’ve discovered a problem where you have a unique solution. You never really know if people will buy it until they actually buy it.
With the third strategy, you know people buy what you offer. You just have to convince them that you’re the best choice.
A great deal of marketing happens within competitive spaces. Many offers from contractors, retailers or professional services (plumbers, restaurants, lawyers, dentists) exist in this space by default.
Competitive markets are a challenge, but don’t overlook the advantage of entering space where money is already being spent. The right strategy can put in you a good place.
Perhaps the most common example of this strategy in action is hamburger restaurants. In America, you’d think the market for serving burgers would have been saturated years ago. In the typical city, there are more restaurants with burgers on the menu than those without them.
In recent years, chains, like 5 Guys Burgers and Fries and Freddy’s Frozen Custard & Steakburgers have taken considerable share from giants, like McDonald’s and Burger King.
Their high-level strategy was to re-position themselves with their version of a burger and simply go for a market where they knew people spent a great deal of money.
With a competitive strategy, the key is to offer unique value. While you’re offering something similar to the competition, you also have a unique value that distinguishes your offer from theirs. You have what people want, but in a way that’s a bit different/better than anyone else.
Conclusions
It’s hard to overstate the importance of knowing your high-level marketing strategy before you start to develop and execute campaigns. You have to know where you are with regard to these three strategic positions. That knowledge will influence everything else you do.
These three strategies are at a high level, which means as you dig into things, there will be overlap. It’s unlikely you’ll find a totally new solution to a brand new problem. Few ideas today are totally unique. There is always a level of competition, of which the most difficult to overcome may be the consumer’s own indecision.
But you can’t pack for your trip if you don’t know where you’re going. Find your destination on the strategic map. It will guide all your future decisions.
Originally published on 6/30/17
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