It takes a killer marketing strategy to get a small business off the ground and to become profitable, competitive and sustainable. This strategy guide shares a practical five-part formula that will help you build a successful marketing strategy for your business, without a vast amount of experience or a business degree. The 5W Marketing Strategy provides a simple way to think about drawing customers to your business.
Understanding the 5W Marketing Strategy
The What Who How Where and Work of the 5W Marketing Strategy can also be seen as the Three Honest Questions and two bonus questions. What do you want to sell? Who do you want to sell to? How do you want to sell? Where do you want to sell and how do you want to win? With these five ingredients, you craft the recipe for a winning marketing plan built around your business goals. Let’s take a closer look at How, Where, What, Who, and Work.
1. What: Defining Your Product
The first pertinent task in the 5W Marketing Strategy involves identifying what you want to market. Your business might be offering several products to its customers, but it’s not advised to let it be a free-for-all or try to market everything at once. Instead, it may be helpful to start by focusing on one product if you sell many. Doing so helps establish a more focused and specific marketing objective.
That should guide your selection, as to which of your products embody your company’s mission, or at least the way you say you want to help your customers. Over time, this is likely to become your primary value proposition and the way large scale has you offering your services to the public. Unless you are a ruthless self-promoter, don’t change your product on a whim.
2. Analyzing the Competition
Now that you’ve determined your core product, the next step is to analyse competitors’ similar products. When you understand the competitive landscape, this is important because your customers will be exposed to different marketing messages by other businesses.
Write a list of the competition, do some digging to see how similar products are marketed, and then craft compelling messages that highlight what makes your product different.
3. Identifying Unique Selling Points (USP)
With your competition analysis complete, you can now pinpoint your product’s unique selling points (USPs). What is it about your product that hasn’t already been offered elsewhere, and which could give it an edge over competitors? It might be a distinctive feature, a service or a quality that they do not currently offer.
To find your USPs, think about why you did things a certain way when you created your product. Think about what makes your product different. Think about where customers might have alternatives, and then explain why your offering is a better or more attractive one.
4. Who: Defining Your Target Market
The second component of the 5W Marketing Strategy is finding your niche (or identifying your target market). Knowing who your customers are allows you to craft the right marketing messages for them. Start with creating personas, which are understandings of your buyer personas: who are your ideal customers, what are their demographics, interests and buying habits?
Then think about the reasons they might buy your product. What problems does your product solve for your target market? The more clearly you can define your target audience, the more you can shape your marketing messages.
5. How: Crafting Your Marketing Strategy
Now that you clearly know what product you’re selling to whom, it’s time to develop your marketing strategy: how will you tell your audience about your product? How will you get your product in front of consumers, and turn them into buyers?
Set measurable marketing goals, such as the number of units you want to sell by a given date. For instance, you may set a goal of selling 500 units of your product in the next six months. Defining realistic and measurable goals will help you to focus your efforts.
6. Where: Choosing Your Marketing Channels
Lastly, once you have your marketing strategy figured out, you will want to figure out where you would like to promote your product – or, in other words, which are the best channels you will use to engage with your audience. Think about which channels will best serve your marketing goals and target audience.
So, if your strategy involves paid advertising on Facebook, then Facebook should be on your ‘most important marketing channels’ list. Keep your focus on a few key platforms, instead of spreading yourself too thin Top-ranked marketing channels should always be towards the top of your budget.
7. Work: Implementing Your Marketing Plan
The final step of the 5W Marketing Strategy is the execution of your marketing plan. This is the step where you put your marketing goals into action through content that connects to your target audience. This content may take many different shapes on different channels, like social media, blog articles, videos or email marketing that all finally connect to your target audience.
Create an editorial calendar and publish on a regular schedule for a sense of accountability. Measure the success of your content, and adjust your strategy as needed so that it is meeting your goals.
Measuring Success and Adapting Your Strategy
It’s also important to assess the impact of your marketing strategy to ensure that it continues to be effective. Ensure that you have tracking systems in place for your main KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) – these are the measures you have agreed will be the most important. Monitor your site traffic, conversions, customer engagement and any other metrics over time.
Analyse these metrics on a regular basis to identify trends and areas for improvement. This way, you can fine-tune your marketing strategies over time and adjust to shifting market conditions, through the use of real data.
Final Thoughts
Marketing your small business isn’t rocket science. By applying the 5W Marketing Strategy framework to your business, you can develop a clear and simple marketing plan that helps you find and keep customers. Keep in mind: marketing is a long-term project. You win with consistency, and you win as long as you are willing to adapt.
As the final step to your marketing supercycle, take the time to dive deeper into certain aspects of marketing that you’d like to improve on, by listening to podcasts or taking online courses.
Now that you know all the steps to develop your marketing strategy for your small business, it’s now time to act out this techniques and begin applying it to your business today. Don’t wait, begin now! You are on the way to growing your business.