With more than 50 years of combined experience in marketing, we know a thing or two when it comes to strategy and tactics for small business.
At Wild Coffee Marketing, the core of our marketing philosophy is simple but critical: We believe it’s vital to implement strategy before tactics, and never the other way around. The biggest mistake small businesses make in marketing is not developing a strong strategy before executing on tactics.
With our clients, the first thing we do is define strategy, which to us means, ‘what are we going to say and who are we going to say it to?’As a small business owner, if you can’t answer these two questions, then any tactics, such as Pay Per Click, print advertising, direct mail, email, social media, etc. won’t work.While it’s tempting to dive right in sending emails and posting catchy memes, without having a long-term, big-picture strategy that answers those two key questions, your tactics won’t really matter and likely be far less effective than you want.
From our experience, the best way to answer those two strategy fundamentals is to survey your ideal customers – someone who is profitable and refers your business. Once we’ve identified a small group of your ideal customers, we have an open, honest discussion with the following questions:
- Why did they work with you to begin with?
- Do they refer your business? If yes, why?
- What do you do that your competitors don’t?
- What could you do better or differently?
- And how do they search for a business like yours online?
These five questions, while crucial in gauging your audience, will lead to more, deeper questions that get to the root of why your business is great and what to go to market with.
Our goal is to say the right thing to the right person at the right time. Understanding your customers and defining your strategy is part art and part science – both of which are extremely valuable and necessary when determining the right mix of tactics to use.
Through these targeted, strategic conversations with your customers, we identify key points – golden nuggets, if you will – that we want to use in your messaging moving forward.
On top of that, our strategy defines the profile of your ideal client, who they are, what they do, demographics, psychographics and a host of other valuable information that we use to develop your marketing tactics moving forward.
When small businesses work with marketing companies, they expect instant results, instant leads and instant growth. There are no magic bullets in marketing. At Wild Coffee Marketing, we believe in the value of legwork in order to generate quality results. We do this because it’s critical to get the results our clients want and deserve.
Discover more about partnering with Wild Coffee Marketing by visiting the “plans” section of our Website, by liking our Facebook page and subscribing to our blog.
