Galaxy Marketing Solutions

Imagine you are a fisherman trying to catch fish. Further imagine that you need to catch a fish or your family doesn’t eat tonight. Now, how are you going to go about catching that fish? You can stand in a stream and throw rocks at passing fish. You can try to grab them out of the water with your bare hands. Or, you can take a few minutes and create a strategy to catch fish.

It astounds me how many companies are promoting without a marketing strategy. When I ask owners what their strategy is, I see a glazed look in their eyes. In some cases, they tell me, “to get more business.”

I’m just going to say it: “Can we please stop the madness, people?”

I believe my fishing analogy is particularly apt in comparison to marketing. Your prospective customers are like fish, swimming in a sea of problems, information, marketing messages for every conceivable product or service. Your job as a business owner or marketer is to penetrate through that mess, grab their attention and lure them in. If they don’t bite, you don’t eat.

If you want to be successful, you need to create and implement a strategy. This involves knowing your prospects, knowing their pains and their goals, knowing how your product and service can address those pains or goals, and how to communicate all of this in a meaningful, impactful way. If you don’t do all of things, you won’t get sales, and to some degree, you won’t eat.

A marketing strategy takes all of this information into account and develops actionable steps that are designed to achieve these aims. Some parts of the strategy are aimed at informing; others at calls to action, and still others are aimed at post-sale actions, such as referrals. A good strategy needs to incorporate market research, competition and internal delivery capabilities.

A good strategy will also be flexible and allow or plan for growth. For example, my strategy may be to begin with free marketing tools like social media and blogging, then incorporate direct mail or internet advertising as sales and revenue increase. I may start by asking for referrals directly, then running contests or other expanded referral programs to increase that avenue of business.

I tell people that a good marketing strategy can increase your results by 10 times or more. I honestly think this is very conservative. Imagine how long it would take you to catch a fish in my example above by just blindly throwing spears in the water, versus spending a half hour constructing a fishing pole and then using that to catch fish for the rest of the day.

Don’t know where to begin? Call in the experts! We’ll help you develop the perfect marketing strategy for your business. Call 727–531–7171 x1013 for more details.