Most companies look for something unique, original and aligned with the company’s values when they plan their marketing strategies, but for some out there, particularly for small businesses or people with not a lot of marketing skills, finding an original way to promote their products and services can turn into a nightmare with less than good results. Disasters and loss of money are involved until they turn to a marketing agency in Orange County or anywhere else to fix their marketing mistakes.
More than often, small businesses struggle with marketing budgets, if they even have one. Before you decide to DIY, you should look around and find out if you really can’t afford a marketing agency. If you are not able to hire a professional at this point and you don’t know much about marketing, maybe you want to look into benchmarking.
Benchmarking is a process where you identify companies about the same size as yours that have a more competitive market position and analyze their way of marketing. The highlight of benchmarking is that it is easier to find a pattern that is acceptable for your target audience and work from there, instead of creating one. The downside of it is that you may be able to pull out a marketing strategy that is somewhat original, but it won’t be a disruptive idea. The risk is low, but the outcome will probably not be as great as it could be with a riskier choice.
I strongly recommend you learn about benchmarking and make a plan to extract as much information as you can. But what you really need to do is focus on one thing at a time, define your goals, identify the companies that you would want to emulate, collect data, analyze the data, determine the path to follow, adjust it so it is aligned with your company´s values, products and services, launch a test to feel the waters, adjust accordingly, implement, review the outcome and adjust again.
The whole process may sound simple, but it is not as simple as it seems; every step should be carefully reviewed and evaluated. You can’t take a lot of time, because if you do so, by the time you are done analyzing and reviewing the data, your competitors may have a new marketing strategy in place and do it all over again. Another way to do this is to investigate past marketing campaigns and find patterns, most of the time, small companies, follow a certain way of doing things, and they only add here and there to make the campaign new or better, but the core remains the same.
To find out more about the best way to do your marketing, you can always approach a marketing agency in Orange County, and at Twelve12, we have a wide range of options for your business at incredible prices.