Get beyond basic marketing strategies

All too often marketing strategies get left to chance. Maybe there’s an ad campaign or some keyword research, but usually these expenditures are never measured for their return on investment (ROI). Marketing strategy turns into an airplane’s so-called black box: yes, we need to have one, but we hope to never deeply look inside it. 

Yet marketing efficiently is actually quite simple. And a quality marketing strategy is often what sets an outstanding business apart from a mediocre one. So instead of throwing marketing strategies at the wall to see what sticks, let’s step back and look at what marketing strategy examples or templates can work for your business. Here we’ll cover Jay Abraham’s take on marketing (spoiler alert: we bet it’s not what you think) and how to start crafting a testable, optimizable marketing strategy that will help create incredible gains for your business.

When do you need marketing strategies?

The short answer is: always. However, during tough economic times, many businesses start cutting back on their sales and marketing investments. But these are the times to bolster your marketing efforts, provided you know how to ensure this added investment will pay off. Unquantified shots in the dark are not a smart investment, but Jay knows that a carefully crafted marketing strategy can have a ROI of over 100%.

The key here is having a marketing strategy that can be tracked, evaluated and continually improved. Jay defines marketing as the process you use to educate the marketplace about how your business can solve their problems or achieve opportunities and goals in ways no other business can. If you can articulate the answer to a problem your prospective client didn’t even realize they had, you will experience incredible growth, no matter the economic times.

What makes up a good marketing strategy?

Marketing can be the most highly leveraged investment a business can ever make, but that’s impossible if you don’t understand marketing’s multifaceted role:

Another important element of a quality marketing strategy is to know your target goal. “Make more money” is a start, but it’s unclear how you will you know when you’ve achieved it. But a goal like “Make $100,000 this year in new client sales” is measurable and concrete. Remember: there are only three ways to increase sales knowing your goal will help you figure out which will be the best strategies for getting there. What is it you want to accomplish?

How do I get started with marketing strategies?

Take a deep breath and answer this question: Is the approach you’re using to generate and sustain business anywhere close to the highest and best approach out there? (We bet you’re like most of us and the answer is no, otherwise you wouldn’t be still reading.)

When you set out to target the right marketing strategies, you have to think beyond what you’ve just done before. To help you get started, answer these questions about your business (if you don’t know the answers yet, now is a great time find them out):

Questions like these lead you to leverage marketing, which allows you to break down every aspect of your current business processes to understand where real change and growth can take place, often with just small changes. For example, Jay helped a client test changing a call to action from “buy my widget” to “by my widget now.” The result was a roughly 40% immediate sales increase. With the right marketing strategy, small changes turn into big returns.