A Crash Course on Marketing Strategy

We're going into 2023 and it's a great time to revisit and refresh your marketing strategy, creating a new offering or changing directions. In this video, we're going to approach your marketing strategy from the inside out. I know I'm not the first person or the last to take on this topic, but I really want to give a solid foundation for your marketing, and that means we cannot skip this essential step.

 In my marketing classes, they framed strategy in a very traditional way. They used two different models. One is the stp, segmenting, targeting and positioning, and then the four P's of marketing, place, price, promotion, and product. By the way, those four P's aren't in any particular order. 

Just so this video isn't super long, I'm actually gonna cover the four P's in a different video as we get into the more implementation side of the strategy. When we get more granular, the place, the price, the product itself is going to come more into play.

Segmenting, Targeting, and Positioning

I'm gonna talk way deeper into positioning in the next video, because I do think about it a little bit differently than other marketing people. But to be really brief I believe that we should start inward with our own experiences, our own values and our story to position ourselves as unique.

Positioning at first was you were supposed to look at your competitors and your marketplace inform your positioning strategy by trying to fill in the gaps. [00:02:00] And to be clear, I'm not saying we should neglect that completely, but if you're starting off and basing a strategy completely based on somebody else's business and situation, it's just not a good move.

We don't know their situation. We don't know what their goals are for their business. We don't know what what they're trying to do. We don't know the context behind their strategy or why they're showing up the way that they're showing up. So it just, to me, isn't strategically a good move.

But when you wanna develop a positioning and messaging that's separate from other people, the marketing analysis can come afterwards, once you are really firm in what you stand for. 

For segmenting and the targeting aspect, I'm gonna try to sum up my feelings about the ideal clients and avatars. What, is frustrating? What is keeping them up at night? What feels overwhelming to them? What feelings are coming up when they think about the problem that you solve?

What have they already tried? What's their situation? This all goes into your copywriting and your marketing, but as you think through these things, often you're gonna find that there's more than one segment in your audience.

There's people at different stages of their life and their business. If you work with business owners, is this something that they're pursuing as a side hustle right now? Is it somebody who's doing it full time? Is it somebody who has been doing it for a while, but is pivoting into a a different service .

Another example, this is one may seem pretty obvious, but maternity photographers, right? You may work with pregnant people, but you also may work with parents and newborns. Maybe you have a specific messaging or specific package for people who are first time parents. There's different ways to think through the different people in your audience.

And you don't have to have a different strategy for each segment. The messaging and the website should again, speak to the collective situation and feelings that they're having. But the actual offerings themselves are often going to be geared to that one particular segment.

Because it's gonna be tailored to their specific frustrations and challenges that other people might not share. The better you understand their problem, the more that they're convinced that you are gonna be able to solve it. And then from there, those individual offerings are going to have their own strategies and tactics that are used specifically for that .

If you have a specific course in mind, maybe it lends itself really well to a challenge or there's specific Facebook group that you've developed for that segment. Your overarching marketing strategy, and then it's an umbrella. And then of course the offerings themselves will have like, mini strategies.

That's why I think segmenting, targeting and positioning are a good way to start to think about that. And again, we're going inward first in our own clients and our own people that we're trying to help first, as opposed to just looking what other [00:05:00] people are doing. 

SWOT Analysis and Understanding the Landscape

However, this is where we're gonna get into what's called SWOT analysis that's gonna look at that landscape in that marketing.

So SWOT analysis is there something in the marketing that's missing? Are you tackling the problem in a fresh way? What are your own blind spots with your business and marketing? What are some market trends that you should be aware of or that you can even take advantage of?

 SWOT, if you're not familiar, stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. I personally like this tool because it's looking at both the internal and the external equally. 

 The strengths and the weaknesses, typically at the top, they're gonna be internal to your own business , and the opportunities and threats are going to be what's external to your market and to your competitors.

 You'll often see it on the, maybe one page divided into four quadrants. You don't have to do it that way, but that is often what is done. It's, more to be like a braindump, it's not meant to be really thought out yet.

It's taking a look around and being like. What's going on? What we're even looking at your own content. Where am I strong? What is getting people's attention? What's not, what are things I need to work on? Again, we talked in the last video about me, I'm not a visual person, so I really needed to step up my visual game, and that's something I realized about my own marketing was that wasn't holding people's attention.

I also like SWOT analysis because you can come back to it repeatedly. In fact, it's a great tool to use like in a yearly review. Again, we're in December. It's a great time to start looking back. It helps you to see what worked, what didn't and what play a role in that. Sometimes what we are doing isn't necessarily bad, but maybe it's wrong timing.

Maybe it's there's something going on in the marketplace or in the industry that is shifting. And there's something that we need to just adapt to our overall strategy. . For the opportunities and threats. 

I do wanna have a quick caveat. We'll often list or recognize trends that are coming up and I do think it's important to be aware of what platforms, formats, are trending. But that doesn't necessarily mean you have to jump on them. You don't have to do what everyone else is doing. And you can still be successful.

For me, this is more just about situational awareness.

Intro to Value Propositions

The last piece, and again this is a lot of information I'm trying to boil down quickly. It's your value proposition. And this is even part of your messaging as well, but I think it's important to include this. 

A part of your business's overarching strategy should include what's called your value proposition.

It's basically what's makes you unique and it makes it relevant to your audience because no one can replicate your story, but why should they care? What does your story mean to them. And understanding this about you and your business is not going to be instant, and that is completely okay. It's an evolving process to understand your unique value proposition.

To talk about myself briefly about this, I used to not talk about my previous career as a nurse. Yes. I was a nurse for nine years before I started doing marketing and copywriting and messaging. 

But now, I wear that part of my life and my story with pride. Why? Because after working with mentors, developing my own marketing, and like I told you, I went through my own messaging process, it really made me realize how these are connected.

Nursing and storytelling and copywriting, they seem very disparate . But I realized that throughout my career, no matter what role I was in, I have always helped people feel seen and feel validated. That's what I did as a nurse, and that's what I do for business owners and in the copy that I write for them, the people that read my copy, feel seen, not sold to.

That's my value proposition. That's my value proposition right now. This is evolving. It might be different in a couple of years, but understanding that about myself right now has been super important and it gets you laser focused on what makes sense for your marketing strategy and for what your people need to know about you before working with you. All of the pieces to this big puzzle.

Is Your Value Proposition Unique?

I will say also when you're developing your value proposition, making sure that it's actually unique. Make sure it's actually something that only you can say you can look at some major brands. In fact, in a previous like workshop I did with people I used American Express as an example, they claimed on their about page, they were the best in class in their customer service, but let's face it.

Lots of other people can say the same crap. That [00:10:00] doesn't make you unique. In fact, to me that's wow, you had nothing better to put here. And so you just defaulted to your customer service. Whether or not that's true. I think it's up for debate anyways. I've never used American Express, so I can't speak to their specific customer service.

It's like best, pizza place in town. And you're like, are you really? I'm gonna go back to pizza . There was a place in Kansas City, so I'm from Kansas City, not from Kansas City, Missouri, but I live here. It's actually based in Lawrence, but it's called Papa Keno's and their value proposition was pieces as big as your face.

they sold it by the slice. They also sold it full pizzas. But their piece of pizza actually was so, big that they cut this piece of pizza into smaller pieces for people to eat. That's how big their, slice. One slice was enough. There's no way you could eat more than one slice usually.

In fact, I would buy two because I wanted another one to have at home. Sorry to plug a really [00:11:00] specific local pizza place. You're like, okay, why? Why does that matter? But that is something very specific that I've never seen anywhere else. And even though they no longer operate in Kansas City, I have the urge to drive to Lawrence, which is 45 minutes away for one of those slices of pizza because there is no other pizzas like it.

 It's very specific and something that's actually unique. When you think of through these things, and that's why it's hard, right? It's hard for a reason. If you could just say Hey, I'm a copywriter. My copy will perform better than anyone else's. I can't claim that, right?

And also that's, too easy? But I can dig deep into the emotional side of things that help your people feel seen and validated and you really have to dig deep and deep to get to that value proposition because you know it's gonna attract the right people to you.

Additional Resources

People with the same values or who can see themselves in your story. For help for this I used what's called the the Business Model Canvas by Alex Osterwalder. CV Harquail developed a version called the Feminist Business Model Canvas that looks at things both from the very personal side into the social side of how are we adding to the culture and building power in our communities.

I really enjoyed looking at it from that side of things. Because again, that attracted her right people, me, something who's concerned about that and wants to include that in my marketing and my messaging. Again, talking about value propositions, that same canvas, there's a one specific for value propositions and the book is called Value Proposition Design, , by Alex Osterwalder, and some co and co-authors.

It's a quick visual read, but it also helps contextualize some of these things. The book Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout. It has some good things that I got out of it, but be warned, it is old as fuck. A lot of the thinking and the data in it is completely outdated. So it's like one of those things where you skim through and you take what you want and you leave the rest, in my opinion.

But because of that, it's also a quick read. Another resource is actually the first business book, the first time a business book has ever kept me awake late, late, late at night reading. And it's called "Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist" by Sally Hogshead. It was the first time that happened for me and it was so many light bulbs going off.

It's such a huge inspiration to my own service and what I do with my clients. 

So the next video, I do wanna dive deeper into positioning your business. Cause I feel that's such an important aspect of the messaging, the branding, the overall marketing strategy that really deserves its own video in this series.

And remember, the world needs what you have to say.