Marketing Strategy

You’ve probably heard the old adage, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” There couldn’t be a more true statement as it relates to a company’s marketing strategy. Creating a plan to attract and retain customers is crucial for any company to not only grow market share, but to maintain it.

So, what does developing a marketing strategy entail? Like business planning, each company has their own unique method. Here’s how we create winning marketing strategies at Heart & Hustle Brands.

Define your audience

Whether you’ve been in business for a year or a century, it’s likely that your customer profiles will change over time. So, it’s important to identify who your current customers really are, what’s important to them, and how your service or product solves their problem or adds value to their lives.

At Heart & Hustle Brands, we begin each engagement getting to know our clients and their customers with a discovery session.

With your key stakeholders, we’ll tap into who your buyers are, including:

Demographics – Age, gender, location, education, marriage status, job title, income. While this might not seem as important to B2B clients, it’s still important to identify similarities
Their Story – Likes, dislikes, challenges they’re facing, media consumption, habits
Needs – What do they need from your product or service? What’s important to them when finding a solution?
Solution – How does your company solve their problem and add value?

Most companies have at least two customer profiles to cover the majority of their target audience. Analyzing your current customer CRM can be very helpful in creating your customer profiles. Without CRM data to analyze, your employees are key in providing the information to fill in customer profiles.

While a full market study isn’t always necessary, qualitative and quantitative research in the form of interviews or surveys can uncover direct feedback that you can’t get from your employees.

Brand messaging

Now that we’ve identified who your target audience is, we’ll help develop the right marketing message to capture their attention.

Creating key messaging that resonates with your customers starts with your purpose and company culture. Why you do what you do is just as important to your customers as it is to your employees. Happy employees make happy customers, right? So, provide your team with a message that elicits pride in the workplace. We’ll work with your stakeholders to identify your unique message in the following categories:

Culture – How does your community describe you? What are your values and reason for being?
Voice – What’s your personality? How do you want to sound to your customers?
Feeling – How should others feel after interacting with your brand?
Impact – What’s the tangile impact that your product or service delivers?
X-Factor – What makes your company unique? How do you stand out in your customers’ minds?

Once we’ve captured feedback from your team, we’ll create compelling, unique statements that speak to your audience. From your mission, vision and values to your value proposition, you’ll finally have a consistent set of messages for telling your story.

Goals and Objectives

Identifying goals for growing revenue could help uncover new opportunities for serving your target audience. A new service or product could change your business’s trajectory. Collaborating with key stakeholders within your company, we can help offer new and innovative ideas in the brand discovery session aimed at growing revenue.

How do we reach customers and make them aware of your services? There’s a variety of marketing tactics that can be utilized to reach your audience, but not every medium makes sense for your company, your audience or your budget. We’ll brainstorm and identify new and creative ways to build brand awareness for your products and services from social media, paid search, content marketing, collateral, and traditional media. We’ll prioritize the ideas for feasibility and desirability and develop a media plan to help achieve your goals.

Creating efficiencies with your brand can help you achieve your goals faster. From creating templated proposals to contracting out certain tasks, we’ll develop ideas for saving time and money while growing your brand.

Let’s build your brand

Communication Map

Maintaining a connection with your target audience is key to creating a loyal customer following. We’ll map out the key touchpoints along the customer journey, from the moment your prospect discovers your brand to the opportunities to influence their actions to eventually becoming a raving, loyal fan.