If you’re on the fence about whether creating a marketing strategy is right for your dive business then this is the blog for you! Read on for our top reasons why this is the right decision for your business.
If you’re unsure what a marketing strategy actually entails you can find a quick explanation below:
- A marketing strategy is a long-term plan for your marketing efforts, normally for the next year.
- As part of a strategy you will have a research phase where you do competitor research and internal evaluation.
- You will also set goals for what you want the strategy to achieve, and identify the ways in which you will measure how well you have achieved these goals.
- The next step is to identify the high-level ways you want to achieve the goals (create a content strategy, build social media campaign etc.)
- This is then broken down into actionable items (such as updating a web page, writing blog posts, budgeting etc.)
- Lastly, you will take time at the end of the strategy to evaluate how well it went, and whether there are any changes or improvements that can be made for the next strategy.
To learn more about how to create a marketing strategy, be sure to sign up for our live Marketing Webinar: How to Create a Marketing Strategy on 18th February 2021.
So, why should you create a marketing strategy?
Save time
By taking time to understand who your audience is, what key business and marketing goals you want to focus on, and what direction you want to take your marketing you can efficiently plan your marketing activities for the rest of the year.
For example: By making the most of quiet seasons to plan marketing strategies you can ensure that any time consuming elements of the plan are completed before the busy season, so you can make the most of your time off relaxing instead of worrying about writing a blog post for the next day!
Improve business returns
Creating a marketing strategy not only improves business returns through increasing profitability by running specific, targeted marketing campaigns, but reduces the amount of time wasted through incomplete or unrecorded campaigns.
If you previously completed your marketing ‘on the fly’ you may have accidently repeated some communications and not put enough focus on the communications that give you the best business returns, by planning your content in advance as part of a strategy you can identify these issues before it’s too late!
Get ahead of the competition
If you’re on top of your marketing activities you’re less likely to fall behind when certain opportunities or threats arise. For example, dive shops with a well-planned marketing strategy would have just had to adapt their marketing practices for COVID, whereas those without a strategy probably struggled with what to do marketing wise as so much changed so quickly.
When creating your marketing strategy it’s also important to do some competitor research, this might highlight ways in which you can take advantage of marketplace opportunities that other dive shops are unaware of.
Keep organised and accountable
You may have heard the saying ‘Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance’, and marketing is no different! A marketing strategy give you a framework from which to organise your yearly marketing. For example, creating a social media content calendar as part of a marketing strategy can be an easy way to organise the bulk of your yearly content in one go.
A well prepared marketing strategy will also include tracking the success of campaigns through metrics. By understanding how well (or poorly) your marketing efforts have performed you can have more accountability for your marketing actions (not to mention a better understanding what your audience likes / dislikes!).
Inform other key business strategies
A marketing strategy can seem like a large or overwhelming task – especially at the start when in the research phase. However, a lot of the information you gather for your marketing strategy can be used to support other areas of growth in your business. Here are just a few examples of how your marketing strategy can support other key business strategies:
- Personas can be used again for other marketing campaigns
- SWOT analysis can be fed into business plans
- Social and web analytics can inform your business plan, other marketing campaigns and improve current personas
- Planning tasks for staff can help with team management and Pro development
- The budget can be used in the larger business budget
Helps to understand budget
By having an overview of a whole campaign you can spot areas where spend will need to happen and budget for this accordingly, before you have to spend the money! This is especially important if you want to use paid marketing etc.
Make the most of the marketing support from PADI
There’s a lot of marketing support already on offer from us here at PADI. Every quarter we release new marketing toolkits, with practical assets and advice on how to use them in your marketing, these make useful additions to any marketing strategy. We also run marketing webinars where you can learn more about different areas of marketing.
We’re always open to hearing suggestions from members about what support you need – so if your marketing strategy highlights a gap in your knowledge let us know and we’ll be happy to help!
Hopefully this list has convinced you that creating a marketing strategy is the right thing for your business. If you’d like to take the next step and learn how to make a strategy be sure to sign up to our next Marketing Webinar: How to Create a Marketing Strategy. Live on the 18th February at 17:00 GMT
Visit our PADI Pros Site to see our Marketing Toolkits which offer you a range of marketing tools that you can use for your social media campaigns. If you have any questions, please contact your regional marketing team at:
EMEA: marketing.emea@padi.com
PAP: marketing@padi.com
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