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Success with a Powerful Competitive Marketing Strategy
A competitive marketing strategy is the magic recipe a business needs to stand out and ultimately win the hearts and minds of its target audience. Marketing is forever evolving, so it’s important to always place major emphasis on what makes your brand unique and innovative. After all, these are the key ingredients your brand needs to dominate in its market.
Let’s dive right into how to build an effective competitive strategy.
How to Create a Powerful Competitive Marketing
Strategy
1. Establish your Objectives
The first step toward creating a powerful competitive strategy is to carefully define your objectives. Ensure that you map out the vision and direction you have for your brand when crafting your marketing activities.
Some examples of objectives can be: to build awareness of your brand, attract prospects, generate sales or increase customer retention rate. Once your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based (SMART), you can forge the path of your competitive marketing strategy while monitoring its progress.
2. Analyse your Market
A successful marketing strategy involves a thorough understanding of the market you’re in, who your target audience is and who your competitors are. Pay close attention to market and industry trends where you can identify some opportunities and threats. Additionally, observe and understand your customers’ preferences so that you can tailor your strategy accordingly.
Feel free to explore tools such as a SWOT (strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis to collect some valuable information about the internal and external factors relating to your business.
Also, and most importantly, outline your unique selling proposition that will enable your business to stand out. Some USP examples are: “a taste you’ll never forget, quality that will last for generations or you’ll never ever want to leave.”
3. Study your Target Audience
A major ingredient of a competitive marketing strategy is to know, study and segment your target audience. Spend some time on developing buyer personas by observing the demographics, location, desires, interests, behaviors and preferences of your target audience. This is the best way to design your marketing messages, select the best channels and develop your marketing tactics to successfully reach and connect with your target audience.
In addition to that, I would always recommend conducting market research, surveys and requesting customer feedback to gather as much insights as possible and improve your strategy if needed.
4. Pay Close Attention to your Competitors
Assessing your competitors is a key part of creating an effective competitive marketing strategy. This involves identifying their strengths, weaknesses, brand identities, positioning, marketing strategies and tactics, messaging, and of course, their target audience.
Observe their online presence, the various types of content they produce, their pricing strategies and distribution channels. This is where you can collect some valuable insights that would be very useful when crafting your marketing strategies.
Additionally, you can pinpoint any gaps or any areas they may fall short in and use that as an opportunity to offer a product or service that’s unique and valuable.
5. Develop a Unique Value Proposition
When you have analysed the market and carefully defined your target audience, create a unique value proposition that can certainly win your audience over. Always ensure that you clearly communicate the benefits and value that your product/service can deliver as this is the perfect way to show what makes it unique.
This is what will lead the way to successful brand positioning and effective marketing messaging which are the key areas of a competitive marketing strategy.
6. Select the Ideal Marketing Channels
Select the ideal marketing channels that enable your brand to reach your target audience and clearly deliver your brand messages.
Your marketing channels can range from online to traditional media such as social media, website, email marketing, search engine marketing, content marketing, influencer marketing, radio, television and print ads just to name a few.
Once you know your target audience very well where you have observed their preferences and behaviour patterns, you’ll definitely know which channels are ideal for effective reach and engagement.
7. Create an Integrated Marketing Communications Plan
An integrated marketing plan is a must have in a competitive marketing strategy. This is made up of the various marketing channels and activities that will bring your objectives to life. When developing your integrated marketing plan, lay out your marketing budget, assign the resources needed and develop implementation timelines.
Some additional important ingredients for your plan are your brand messaging guidelines, the tools and assets needed to execute the creative aspects, a content schedule and the process and metrics to be used to measure performance.
8. Implement your Strategy
This is where you put your competitive strategy into motion. It’s important that your marketing tactics are executed in a seamless and consistent manner across all channels.
Also, pay very close attention to the implementation to determine how your marketing activities are performing by tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) such as conversion rates or return on investment (ROI) for example.
Leverage and analyse data by assessing ROI and even testing out your campaigns to determine if your strategy needs any adjustments.
9. Continuously Adapt your Strategy
Marketing is always evolving and the key to a successful and powerful competitive marketing strategy, is to adapt to trends and changes in consumers’ tastes and behaviour. This consist of keeping up with any changes within your industry and continuously seeking feedback from your customers.
Utilise marketing analytical tools and assess customer insights to make decisions that will position your brand to win and thrive, plus, continuously enhance your strategy.
Creating a competitive marketing strategy that will enable your business to grow, involves setting clear goals, understanding your target audience, analyzing your market and your competitors plus crafting what makes your brand unique. It’s basically the tool you need to master your creative and strategic marketing efforts.
The key to dominating in the business landscape, is to execute strategically and continuously adapt as this is how you can truly WOW your target audience.
- Marketing
- What is Marketing Strategy?
- Competitive Marketing Strategy