What is a marketing strategy? Why does a marketing strategy matter? How can it help? These are important questions that might not be front of mind when you’re coming up with the idea of running an academic publishing company.
Vision is important, but a good idea is only as successful as the plan behind it.
In this article, we’ll be touching on these three questions to help you establish your vision and find success.
What is a marketing strategy?
Marketing strategies are a sort of North Star for your business. It’s the plan of how your journal (or journals) will position themselves among all the other hundreds of publishing companies and thousands of journals. Importantly, your marketing strategy is a statement of what value you are offering (or will offer in the future) to authors. Journal growth isn’t immediate, so your strategy will help keep your goals focused for the long term. This is one of reason why it matters.
Like any budding company, you need to understand business goals, target market, and buyer personas (more on these later). You also want to understand how this knowledge can help you to understand where you stand. You probably have competitors so you need to be clear about why your journal is where your authors should publish.
This strategy is a living, breathing document. As time goes on, you’ll want to make sure that you update it with new information and plans.
Knowing how to write a marketing plan is also important, and there are many different ways to go about doing this. We’ll be going over this in more detail in a future post.
Why does a marketing strategy matter?
In many ways, a marketing strategy is what connects you to your principles and your customers. Journals in particular are long-term goals. There is no way to have a number one journal in a year—it simply cannot be achieved. Running a successful journal means to be competing for a segment of the market that journals like Nature or The Lancet also may occupy.
Running an academic journal as a business is a long game. Make sure that you have the right gameplan—a marketing strategy—to succeed.
So, when you’re thinking about your strategy, the best thing to do is think about your objectives and goals.
What does a marketing strategy look at?
The goal of this sort of strategy is to determine who your customers might be, how to attract them, and how to keep them. While these aren’t the only things, they are important elements of a marketing strategy.
As such, a marketing strategy will look at identifying your target audience, and consider things like marketing channels to reach your potential customers. In addition, it might look at tactics and brand messaging.
At the end of the day, your marketing strategy’s goal should be to position yourself in the field relative to your potential competitors. This plan should be a clear-eyed view of where you stand and what your paths forward are.
Identifying customers
You may have heard the term “buyer persona” before. Sometimes this is referred to as a customer profile. A buyer persona is a fictional individual who embodies real-world elements of your client base. You are using buyer personas to understand what your customers are looking for.
In identifying the people, what they want, what they don’t want, and why they’d consider you, you are starting to establish a plan.
“Find customers” sounds great, but isn’t helpful. “Find academics aged 30-60, with an interest in biochemistry, on Linkedin” is a far more actionable path forward.
Budget, budget, budget
Everything needs money—whether that is manhours or dollar bills. Advertising costs money, but so do the resources that you need to spend to develop a marketing strategy in the first place.
Determining what your budget looks like will help you to more effectively allocate resources. It is important to ensure that you do not spend resources that you don’t have to work on a strategy cant you can’t afford. Be realistic about your needs and what you can do.
Resources that you would normally devote to other tasks might need to be diverted to put together your marketing strategy. Finding ways in order to more effectively accomplish other parts of the job can help you to free up time and money to make sure your strategy is good.
Marketing strategies can evolve over time
Just like a strategy needs to change over time, the content we offer on strategies will also continue to be updated and changed. Check back soon for more details on the different ways to work on a marketing strategy!