What is Marketing Leverage, and How Can You Use It?

For virtually every business, effective marketing is crucial to generating success. After all, it’s not enough to simply have an amazing product or service you can offer consumers. You also need to make people aware of the solutions you can provide, in order to attract and convert leads.

The challenge for many businesses is in figuring out how to utilize marketing strategies effectively to achieve the right goals. Marketing leverage is a way of accessing and using the best possible promotional methods available, to ensure sustainable growth.

What is Marketing Leverage? An Introduction

Marketing leverage might sound like a complex term, but it’s relatively straightforward. It involves learning how to use promotional materials effectively, to capture new leads and potential customers. Effective marketing and advertising helps businesses to generate revenue, by placing their businesses in front of the correct customers, at the best possible time.

The main goal of marketing is to convert potential leads into loyal customers. However, effective marketing can also help to improve your brand reputation, separate you from your key competitors, and boost your chances of long-term relationships with clients.

Utilizing marketing leverage essentially means using the 4 Ps of the marketing mix correctly, this means you’ll need to master the use of:

• Product: Designing solutions (products or services) to satisfy a specific market need, solve a customer’s problem, or respond to growing demand in your industry.
• Promotion: Advertising your products and services with a focus on highlighting specific benefits to your target audience. Utilizing promotion effectively also involves knowing which channels to market on, and what kind of voice you should use in your messages.
• Price: Selecting the right price for your product or service based on the value it can deliver to your target audience, and the competition in your space.
• Place: Placement in the marketing mix involves ensuring your customers can encounter your products, services, and marketing messages in the right environment. Effective placement involves understanding how to use a combination of offline and online strategies.

Why is Marketing Leverage Necessary?

Ultimately, discovering how to use marketing leverage effectively ensures you can improve the return on investment generated by each of your promotional campaigns. Understanding how to connect with your audience using not only the right tone of voice, but the correct promotions and channels means you’re most likely to capture the attention of potentially loyal customers.

Fundamentally, marketing leverage helps to improve the ROI of your organization, by ensuring you send the correct message to your leads at the ideal time. Using effective marketing leverage strategies ensures you can create new products, sales channels, and campaigns that increase revenue and profit.

However, the right leverage in marketing can also deliver other benefits. It can open the door to new opportunities to expand your current market and discover new profitable landscapes for sales. Marketing leverage can also provide opportunities to generate new revenue streams, helping you to find audiences which aren’t served by competitors in your industry.

What’s more, marketing leverage, when used correctly, can improve your relationships with your customers, and enhance customer satisfaction. When you take full advantage of leverage in marketing, you do so with a deep understanding of your customer’s goals and pain points, so you can more effectively deliver services and solutions tailored to their needs.

Marketing Leverage Examples

Examples of leverage in marketing can be seen in industries all over the world. For instance, in the fashion industry, a company might use marketing leverage to determine whether it makes sense to expand their portfolio out of the “footwear” space, into new environments like accessories.

The same clothing retailer may improve their relationships with customers might offering free alterations on all clothing items for customers who purchase more than one product.

In the technology industry, marketing leverage might involve assisting companies in the B2B sector to install new software and train team members on how to use the solutions purchased, to increase return on investment.

In the food and beverages space, a company taking advantage of marketing leverage may research their current audience, and make changes to the ingredients in their products based on growing trends, like the demand for healthier, locally-sourced products.

How to Use Marketing Leverage

Taking advantage of leverage in marketing is a process which companies need to commit to on a consistent basis. The more you learn about your target audience, competitors, and wider industry, the more you’ll be able to adjust your marketing strategy to achieve business goals.

Here are some quick tips to help you take advantage of marketing leverage.

1. Research marketing strategies carefully

The first step in utilizing marketing leverage, is analyzing your target audience, company, and competitors in more detail. Conducting research into the current go-to-market strategies and promotional methods working in your landscape will help you to identify which campaigns you want to utilize for your own brand.

Take the time to collect and assess as much customer data as possible, to help you answer questions about which customers are most loyal to your organization, and what convinces them to buy from you. It’s also worth looking into the marketing strategies of your competitors, to help inspire the methods you might use for growth in the future.

2. Understand your target market

Making the most of marketing leverage is different to simply advertising your products and making them stand out in as many environments as possible. The key to success is learning how to position your brand and product in a way that appeals to a specific customer or user base.

To make the most of marketing leverage, you therefore need to understand who is most likely to benefit from your product or service, and what goals and pain points they want to address. Creating user personas based on surveys and market insights can be extremely useful here.

3. Experiment with different approaches to marketing

Once you’ve gathered as much information as possible about your industry and target audience, the next step is experimenting with different “approaches” to marketing. The approach you take to marketing will depend on how you want to connect with your customers, and the methods they use to make decisions about which products and services to purchase.

You can use marketing approaches one at a time to see how they influence your audience, or combine multiple different strategies. For instance, you might choose to use new strategies for developing your products, alongside new placement options and advertising approaches to expand your reach.

4. Analyze, Adjust and Optimize

Finally, once you begin using different marketing approaches, it’s important to examine exactly how they influence your customers, business, and bottom line. Collecting as much information as possible about conversions, engagement levels, and customer sentiment will help you to determine which strategies actually work for your business, and which you should avoid.

Successful marketing leverage requires the use of frequent analytical processes and data collection. You’ll need to determine which pricing, promotion, product development, and placement strategies have the biggest influence on your customer’s loyalty and your revenue.

Using leverage in marketing can be an excellent way to generate more value from your go-to-market strategy. Don’t underestimate the power of adding this factor to your growth campaigns.