Every business owner has to have a marketing strategy as well as a customer retention plan. As an entrepreneur as you start you business, an SME, your business growth depends on your marketing strategy and how well you execute it.

Let’s look at the highlights we will discuss on marketing and customer retention strategies:

• Understanding what marketing is
• The importance of having a marketing strategy
• Having a marketing strategy
• Knowing what is customer retention
• Understanding the benefits of customer retention
• Having a customer retention strategy
• Brand loyalty

Being a business owner, coming into a business you need to have a marketing strategy and knowing as well as understanding what is a marketing strategy. What do you need to understand and why do you need it.

What is a marketing strategy

A marketing strategy refers to a business’s overall game plan for reaching prospective consumers and turning them into customers of products or services the business provides.

Next a marketing strategy contains the company’s value proposition, key brand messaging data on data target customer demographics and other high level elements.

To all you entrepreneurs, “the aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” Peter Drucker, credited as founding modern management.

Importance of having a Marketing Strategy.

Why is having a marketing strategy so important to have in your business? Well, its important because:

• A marketing strategy provides a business an edge over its competitors.
• The strategy helps in developing goods & services with the best profit-making potential.
• Marketing strategy helps in discovering the areas affected by the business growth & helps to create a business plan to cater to the customer.
• It helps in fixing the right price for business goods & services based on the information collected by the market research.
• It helps the business to make optimum utilization of its resources so as to provide a sales message target market.
• A marketing strategy helps to fix advertising budgets in advance & it also develops a method that determines the scope of the plan ie, it determines the revenue generated by the advertising plan.

So my fellow entrepreneurs, a marketing strategy in short clearly explains how an organization reaches its predetermined objectives. So ask yourself, do you have objectives set for your business? If not start setting them as you can move on to strategise.

Marketing Strategies to grow your Business

To be able to grow your business, a marketing strategy is important to have in your plan. Your business just doesn’t grow like trees, or weeds, in order for you to a nice well grown business you have to follow the steps and plan out how you are going to do it.

Let’s take a look at the marketing strategies to grow your business:

1.Study the trends

• Spend considerable time researching market, businesses and customer trends.

2.Understanding your audience

• Knowing what your audience likes and when they use certain social channels are factors that can shape how you develop a persona that defines them.

3.Focus on digital tools

• By staying ahead of digital trends, you could be creating a competitive advantage and return for your growth marketing strategy.

4.Set a budget

• The more tactics you use for your growth marketing campaigns, the more resources you may need to tap into.

5.Focus on a quantitative result to get growth marketing measurements

• Consider having targets in mind that you can access through marketing analytic tools

6.Switch up your growth marketing quarterly

• Aim to try a few growth marketing initiatives each quarter. Consider one or two a few quarters to establish themselves, and switch others out so you can try new types of digital tools. Eg, live streaming video, mobile video.

Next, we are going to talk about Customer Retention, the strategies, and why you need it, and also go through some questions you all have on this topic.