Have you ever gone to start working on building your marketing strategy and then you had no idea where to start? There are seven pillars that make up your marketing strategy and defining them first allows you to build the foundation to then fully build out a marketing strategy for your local business that helps you grow and market more strategically.

Here are those 7 pillars in a nutshell:

1. Establish your business goals: Without defining your business goals, you won’t know what you want your marketing to support. Define what success looks like for your local business and then set marketing goals that will work towards achieving those overarching business goals.
2. Define your customer’s journey: What is your customer’s journey like before they learn about your local business to when they learn about you to when they become a customer and then what does it look like once they are a loyal customer. If you don’t know what your customer needs, it becomes difficult to know what you need to communicate to let them know that your local business is for them!
3.  Write your core messages: What is the messaging that you will use throughout your marketing? You want consistent messaging on your website, social media, email, Google, and other places where your business may be advertised. A confused audience means they won’t end up buying. These core messages come from market research and your customer’s journey.
4. Choose your mediums to share your message: Establish where you’ll share your message – social media, email, Google My Business, tv ads, a podcast, radio, etc. The most important piece of this process is choosing the places where your target customer hangs out. If you’re stuck on which social media platforms would be the best for your business, I have a breakdown of social media platforms and their demographics in this free guide.
5. Establish your systems & processes: Processes keep you consistent and will actually save you time with your marketing. I have a guide that walks you through how to set up your marketing system in a day if you need help getting started.
6. Set your budget: Determine how much you can afford to spend on marketing. You can revisit this every quarter based on how your marketing is converting. If it’s converting well then you may find you can actually increase your budget some later in the year.
7. Analyze your impact: Marketing is an ongoing activity, so you want to evaluate how your marketing is performing and adjust accordingly.

Listen to the full episode to learn about each pillar more in-depth!