Developing Your Marketing Strategy

In the alarm industry, the ultimate goal of your marketing strategy is twofold: to help you grow your customer base by attracting new accounts and to cement your relationships with your existing customers so that they not only become more likely to add on upgrades, but they will also serve as a source of referrals and leads for new customers.

Developing your marketing strategy requires research, thought, and analysis. The first step is to identify your company’s goals and objectives, both short- and long-term (including your exit strategy). Once you are clear on your business goals, part of developing a successful marketing strategy requires you to take a hard look at what is, and isn’t, currently working for your company as it relates to serving your current clients. In order to be what you want to be, you must ask yourself a couple of critical questions:

• •What do your customers want? Being customer-focused and solutions-oriented will help you determine what products and services will best suit your target market.
• •Where are you now and where do you want to go? What portfolio of products and services are you offering now and how do they fit within your target market? Are your offerings competitive? Are there opportunities that you are missing, like new technologies or new services such as home automation, video, or mobile? Or do you have too much overlap within your own mix of products and services, or with your competitors?
• •What are you communicating to your market? Do you know how your customers and prospects perceive you? What do you want to be known for? Value, low-price, quality, reliability, or white glove service? Understanding how the market perceives you, rather than how you perceive your company, is critical to developing your communications. If the market perceives you one way, and you’d like to change that perception, it is important you understand that the time it takes to shift people’s mindset is lengthier than it is if you just want to reinforce what they already think. If you have a good reputation with current customers, but just need more people to know about you, make sure you leverage the testimonials of your current clients to communicate with new ones.
• •How are you communicating with your market? Remember that the ultimate goal of your marketing strategy is to drive growth through lead generation of potential new customers and sales add-ons, or upgrades, to existing customers. To do so, you need to know how your customers behave. Do they search the internet to find you? Do they open emails? Do they talk to their neighbors? Test and measure your marketing programs and sales promotions to ensure that they move your targets along the sales pipeline from prospects to customers and from customers to referral sources.

Setting a clear marketing strategy and then measuring your results will allow you to understand a great deal more about your customers and your business, and will help you grow your topline revenue.