Should you post more on social media?
Invest in SEO?
Run ads?
Redesign your website?
For a growing service-based business, there’s no shortage of marketing options. The harder question is knowing which ones actually make sense for your business right now.
That’s why effective marketing shouldn’t begin with choosing tactics. It should begin with understanding what your business actually needs from its marketing.
Start With the Right Questions
Every business is different.
In our Four Pillars of Revenue Growth series, we looked at the different areas that can drive growth, from credibility and visibility to conversion and retention. But knowing where to focus depends on where your business is today.
That starts with answering five questions.
1. Where Is Your Business Today?
Before deciding how to move forward, you need to understand your current position.
What’s working? What’s not? Where are the biggest opportunities? And what is standing in the way of your next stage of growth?
At The Biz Spa, we use four Growth Stages to identify what a business needs most right now: Get Started, Get Found, Get Leads, and Get Known. A business may have strengths from several stages, but its current stage helps clarify what should happen next.
Knowing where you are helps determine where your marketing needs to take you next.
2. Who Are You Trying to Reach?
“More customers” isn’t specific enough.
Effective marketing starts with knowing who your best-fit customer is, what they need, what they prioritize, what frustrates them, and what might keep them from saying yes. The clearer you are about your audience, the easier it becomes to build marketing around the people most likely to choose your business.
3. How Do Your Customers Think?
Customers don’t make decisions based on your marketing calendar.
They move through their own decision-making process, from recognizing a need to researching options, comparing choices, making a decision, and continuing the relationship after the sale. Understanding that journey helps you meet customers with the right information at the right time.
4. What Must Your Marketing Do?
Not every piece of marketing has the same job.
Sometimes your marketing needs to build awareness. Sometimes it needs to educate customers and establish trust. Sometimes it needs to encourage action. Knowing the job your marketing needs to do helps determine which tactics make sense and creates a more balanced marketing strategy.
5. What Message Will Connect?
You can reach the right person at the right time and still lose their attention if your message doesn’t connect.
A strong message may help customers recognize a problem, understand your process, or see proof that gives them confidence in your business. We call this the MP3 Framework: Market the Problem, Market the Process, and Market the Proof.
The strongest message isn’t simply what you want to say. It’s what your customer needs to hear.
Turning the Answers Into a Strategy
These five questions form the foundation of The Biz Spa Strategy Engine.
The Strategy Engine is the framework we use to understand what a business needs from its marketing and turn those insights into a practical plan.
The questions work together. Where your business is today influences who you need to reach. Your audience influences how customers think and make decisions. That helps determine what your marketing needs to accomplish and, ultimately, what message will connect.
Instead of jumping straight to “What marketing should we be doing?” the Strategy Engine helps answer a more important question first:
“What does our business need from its marketing right now?”
Marketing With a Reason
Marketing doesn’t need to mean doing more. It needs to mean doing the right things for the right reasons.
Throughout this series, we’ll take a closer look at each of these questions and how the answers can help create a more focused, practical marketing strategy.
Next, we’ll explore the first question: Where is your business today? Because knowing where to focus starts with knowing where you stand.