Marketing is one of the fundamental blocks in the foundations of your business. Without a clever marketing strategy, you can’t hope to be successful. It’s impossible to reach your potential if you don’t market and promote your brand at all times. This doesn’t mean you force your company down people’s throats! Instead, it’s all about developing a strategy that subtly makes people feel like they need to buy what you offer. 

Naturally, all businesses and brands are different. What works for you might not work for someone else. As such, we tend to shy away from laying out a marketing strategy framework. Instead, let’s look at three things all marketing strategies need:

Trust

Trust is absolutely essential for a business. If consumers don’t trust your brand they won’t buy anything from you. Therefore, a simple tactic for increasing sales is to build trust with the consumer market. A good way to show the importance of trust is to compare a site like eBay to one like Amazon. If you search for a product, and you see it on both sites, which one are most people likely to drift towards? In most cases, you choose Amazon as you trust that the product will be of high quality. With eBay, you’re buying from sellers that you don’t know, and therefore don’t trust. Even if the product is cheaper, you’d prefer to spend more as you can trust you’ll actually receive a quality product. This shows that trust can help you make sales and also allow you to beat competitors that try to undercut your prices. Consumers want trust, give it to them!

Value

Every business needs to provide value to the customer. This is literally business 101. Pretty much all business coaching programmes will dedicate a section to adding value. Why? Because this is how you set your brand apart from the rest. You must find your value within the market and show it to consumers. This is what makes them realize you offer something more than your rival companies. Thus, the customers come flocking to you instead of everyone else. 

Relatability

In truth, this can also be described as ‘shared values’. However, seeing as ‘value’ is listed above, I chose relatability to avoid any confusion. In effect, this is the act of being relatable to your target market. You build a brand image with values that other people share. A prime example is a new activewear brand called TALA. This brand creates activewear from recycled materials and promotes sustainability. As such, they have a relatability factor with consumers who are looking to be more sustainable. This makes it easy to connect with its target market as both business and consumer have shared values. When you devise your marketing/branding strategy, make sure you pinpoint some key values that relate to your audience. 

It doesn’t matter what your marketing strategy or campaign looks like, as long as you incorporate these three pillars. Trust, value, and relatability all help you stand out from the crowd and capture your target market.