Today, I want to talk to you about seven steps to a differentiated marketing strategy. Now, this is part two of a two-part presentation we did. The first session, we talked about the first three parts of it.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Hi. Today, I want to talk to you about seven steps to a differentiated marketing strategy. Now, this is part two of a two-part presentation we did. The first session, we talked about the first three parts of it.
Now we’re going to pick up with Step 4 in the differentiation, defining and refining your service offerings. Now this is a step that a lot of folks miss or they just kind of skim over because if you started with an understanding of your audience and what makes your firm different, that will help you understand what are the service offerings we should be offering.
So if you’re not coming up with at least one or more new service offerings based on this, then maybe you’re not looking carefully enough. Maybe you’re not understanding the full needs of your client because almost everyone we run across comes up with new service offerings based on a new understanding of their client.
Then you need to identify the marketing techniques you’ll be using. How will you get these messages across to your clients? Now, if you did the research that we talked about in the earlier step, you would have the opportunity to be able to ask them, “Where do you look when you have a business issue that you’re trying to research?Do you look online, do you search it?Do you go to webinars?Do you look for blog posts?”
And this will help you understand what techniques are most likely to reach your target audience most efficiently. Which brings us to the sixth step is to identify any new tools you’ll need, or skills you’ll need, or new infrastructure. Let me tell you what I mean by those. The tools are things you’ll use to convey your message. It might be new wording on a website, it might be a one-sheet that you hand out to potential prospects, or it might be a guide for executives.
The skills are the things you need to do to be able to implement the plan. For some people, it’s sharpening speaking skills or writing skills, for others, it may be developing business development skills. But we know that the high-growth firms have a skills advantage and we want to make sure that you get that advantage too.
And finally, there’s the infrastructure, which is the kinds of things you need to be able to put in place, like a marketing automation system or a CRM system. These are the kinds of things you need to be able to efficiently run a marketing program and differentiates your firm on a high level. And then finally we get to documenting your operational schedule and budget that you’re going to use.
This will become your marketing budget. How often are you going to do which technique on what schedule and with what budget allocated to it? That allows you to update your experience as you go along. So, I would recommend every time you do a technique or every time you do a new webinar or a speaking engagement, you make the notes about how successful was that particular thing And when it’s budget time next year and you’re looking at what you want to do, you’ll be able to make the adjustments and not just forget them in the rush of a busy, busy day.
So we hope this is helpful, but if you want to dig deeper on differentiating, and positioning, and messaging, we recommend that you go to hingeuniversity.com/differentiation and check out the course there. I think you’re going to find it very helpful. Good luck, and happy marketing.
