Perfect way to start your association marketing strategy
Composing a marketing strategy for your association is essential to fulfilling your association’s annual objectives. Your marketing strategy should work as a tool to attract, communicate and retain members and other stakeholders. Developing a marketing strategy is essential for achieving the association’s goals and objectives.
The first step in creating an effective marketing strategy is to conduct a marketing analysis.
What is marketing analysis?
Marketing analysis is a critical study that can provide valuable insights to help associations make informed decisions across various departments, including marketing. By gathering and analysing data, associations can identify trends and patterns that reveal who their members are, as well as potential barriers to recruitment, retention, and satisfaction. However, conducting effective marketing analysis requires discipline and adherence to specific guidelines. By delving deeper into the information about their market, associations can make more informed decisions that will ultimately lead to a more effective marketing strategy
How to conduct a market analysis:
1. Audience research
Audience research is an exercise to gather Intel about your targeted audience. In this exercise, an association must search for its audience’s pain points, buying behaviours, geographical information, and more. Understanding your audience will motivate your branding, pricing, marketing strategy and customer service needs. Your content and communication strategy will be more effective if you view your audience. Targeting becomes apparent when you have good information about your customers.
Ways to conduct your audience research:
• Study your social media audience
• Study your competitor’s public audience insights
• Conducting competitor analysis
• Studying your Google Analytics
• Analyse your sales chat transcripts
• Conducting polls in your various association platforms
2. Competitor analysis
Now we need to understand your competitors or, say, fellow peers. Compiling a competitor analysis study will help you know your peers better. Gathering insights about their offers, marketing strategies, brand placement, and the current audience would be best.
The whole point of performing a competitors analysis is to help an association implement more robust business strategies and understand its model better to ensure they capture its market share.
Ways to conduct your audience research:
1. Identify both your direct & indirect competitors.
2. Determine your competitor’s offer and selling process.
3. Taking a look at your competitors’ pricing and any perks they offer.
4. Analyse and study competitors’ marketing material and strategy.
5. Perform a SWOT Analysis to learn their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
3. Research the state of the industry
Understanding your industry gives you a good overview of your industry. The things you should be up-to-date about in your industry are where it is heading, studying metrics that represent the size, analysing trends, your competitor and threats. This exercise should be a part of your association’s culture.
How to conduct industry research:
• Locating industry surveys and reports
• Utilising the “Porter’s Five Competitive Forces”
• Discovering demographic and market share data and other industry statistics
• Performing competitors analysis
4. Analyse and organise your data
Please ensure that all your information and data comes from credible sources and author because it provides the effectiveness of your market analysis study. All the information you have collected needs to be organised and stored in a disciplined way. If your data is stored and managed, it is accessible and easy to analyse. Understanding the association’s goals at this stage is essential because your research goals should align with the association’s goals and objectives.
5. Put your analysis to work
You have completed your analysis and compiled the report. Now it is time for you to merge it into your marketing strategy. Remember that compiling this marketing analysis is to improve decision-making in your marketing strategy. Now it is time for you to take all your research to the second part of creating a marketing strategy which we will cover in future posts.
Conclusion
Marketing analysis brings value to your marketing strategy. Remember, it’s tough to attack an enemy without knowing who they are and their capability. Marketing analysis is the moment of understanding, and understanding your members, competitors, and industry makes it necessary for any association to have a marketing strategy that will thrive. Your first step in having a great marketing strategy is your market analysis study.