Formulate a strong marketing strategy for the next six months

With every marketing strategy, it is always crucial to start with identifying your business goal and deadline, to develop a marketing strategy that will support that. It is also essential to rope in your team from the beginning as they would also need to be part of the strategy.

A well-developed marketing strategy will help you realise your business’s goals, build a strong presence and trust with your clients, and help you target your services to people who are most likely to be interested. It also makes it easier to build referrals. Let us also just acknowledge that marketing is a key tool for establishing awareness, attracting new clients and building lasting relationships.

To start with the marketing strategy, first identify overarching business goals to define a set of marketing goals. Begin with a snapshot view of your business’s current situation. Let us assume you would like to increase your target audience, or you are not certain what to sell when, or how to position your services. Your business goals might then include:

• Increase awareness of your financial services
• Sell more from a particular product at certain times
• Reach a new target market  
• Increase overall sales.

Now use the above to define a set of specific marketing goals. For instance we will expand on three:

• Increasing awareness of your financial services:
• • Send monthly generic financial advice emails to existing clients  
  • Ask existing clients to refer you to friends
• Selling more from a particular product at certain times:  
• • Use the calendar to set monthly sales themes
  • Use the Campaigns Direct tool on the Financial Adviser Zone (FAZ) to target clients.
• Reaching a new target audience:
• • Sponsor the local school calendar
  • Sell existing products to new target markets.

Your marketing goals could be long-term and might take six to twelve months to successfully achieve. Make sure your overall strategies are practical, measurable and have time frames. A good marketing strategy will not change every year, but be revised after you achieve your strategies or meet your marketing goals.

Follow the newsletter closely for themed monthly email campaigns you can use towards your strategies for 2017.