According to Wikipedia, a Marketing strategy is a process that can allow an organization to concentrate its limited resources on the most significant opportunities to increase sales and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.
What does that mean?
It means keeping up with ever-changing marketing techniques to ensure you’re being as effective as you can with your messaging.
In short, a successful marketing strategy will help you reach your target audience – including your current clients and potential clients who have never heard of you or your brand.
Without a defined and actionable plan, you’ll be chasing your tail to see what works – and that costs, time, and resources.
A successful marketing strategy will:
- Align your team to specific goals.
- Help tie your efforts to business objectives.
- Allow you to identify and test what resonates with your target audience.
Steps for Developing a Solid Plan
Define your brand and your offering. To start building your marketing strategy, you first need to define the core values of your brand. Do they align with what your prospective customers find important? Do they match industry standards? Are they comparable to your competitors?
Set marketing goals. Now that you have a clear idea of your brand values, it’s time to define the goals for your marketing efforts. Start by looking at your overall company goals. For example, if one of your business goals is to increase revenue by 20 percent year over year, consider marketing goals that increase the number of qualified leads or shorten the sales cycle. Here is an example of a marketing goal and the metric used to achieve the goal.
Goal: Drive leads to the sales team
Metric: +300 a month
Complete a Competitive Analysis.
This can also be called a SWOT analysis – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The goal is to identify what makes your product stand out from the competition, where you can improve the product, and where you feel you’ll thrive versus where you’ll run into challenges.
Select the tools you’ll need.
Once you have your goals identified, make sure you have the right tools in place to measure the success of those goals. Google Analytics measures blog and website performance. Software programs such as social media planners and schedulers can provide analytics to help you keep track of what your audience responds to (or doesn’t).
Define your marketing channels.
This is one of the most critical steps in creating your marketing strategy. Each digital marketing campaign will be different, based on the marketing channels you’ll pick. From TikTok to LinkedIn, each channel has its unique advantages.
Implement, Review, Audit.
In other words – ready, set, go! It’s time to put the plan into place, let it rip, and then analyze the results and continue testing. Data is crucial in every aspect of marketing. Savvy marketing managers use data to continue iterating and optimizing their growth strategies. Once you have the results of your strategy, you can then make the changes you need to create and A/B test various aspects to get even better results.
And that’s it, in a tiny nutshell. Marketing isn’t an exact science – it’s something that is constantly changing and evolving. What works today might not work tomorrow. But don’t worry – if you’re overwhelmed, we’re here for you. Most of our clients felt overwhelmed, too. We can help get you on track and establish KPIs that help you make better marketing decisions. Working hand in hand with our clients to clarify and prioritize makes the biggest impact on their businesses.
