Many companies looking to grow often hold onto tactical marketing manoeuvres hoping to make immediate impact on the market. They quickly come up with elements such as logos, brochures, website, social media posts and emails just to mention a few.
Taking this approach often means a strategy is not developed and there is no clear plan to move forward. Instead jumping from one task to another with no guide. A marketing strategy can be this guide and can be defined as a company’s overall game plan in the quest to reach people and convert them into actual buyers.
In essence, this strategy covers the business value proposition, the main branding message, the target customer demographics and the competition. These elements then create a plan of what marketing channels to utilise and key campaigns throughout the year.
All of these elements take into account the businesses overall plan and targets to align them with relevant marketing activities that will attract the right audience and convert. The marketing strategy helps to communicate a sustainable competitive advantage over the existing competitors. This is done by paying close attention to the needs and wants of your customers.
Essentially, the questions to be answered are:
What do we want to achieve?
How will we achieve this?
When will we achieve it?
To create a successful marketing strategy, there are several steps the business should follow.
Developing a marketing mix
This marketing mix captures all the elements required to successfully promote your company’s products or services. It’s the first task that should be undertaken in your marketing strategy to set the base information.
There are 4 Ps of the marketing mix that should be considered:
Product – functionality, service, branding, features
Price – pricing strategy, payment terms
Place – channels, physical locations, inventory
Promotion – advertising, sales promotions
The 4 Ps are often extended to 7 which adds on people, processes and physical evidence.
Set marketing goals
This process should be informed by your company’s overall vision and goals. With these in mind, your business will be able to set marketing goals that are aligned to its objectives.
For instance, the business goal may be to increase revenue by X% or it could be to launch a new product or target a specific market. We can then take the business goal and look at how we utilise our marketing efforts to achieve this.
Try to create SMART marketing goals as you go through this process. This enables you to have a clear direct of what you will achieve, how you will achieve it and by when.
Specific – we want to boost traffic and increase leads for a certain service.
Measurable – the goal is to increase by 10%.
Attainable – over the last year the traffic has steadily been growing and we have gathered data from customers who have purchased the service.
Relevant – This is a high profit service so the additional revenue will help to feed back into the business objectives.
Time bound – We aim to achieve this by the second quarter of the year.
Identify the target market
The target market is the group of customers that are most likely to buy your business products or services. Identifying this group requires a comprehensive understanding of these customers, followed by segmenting them within the general market. This analysis could be based on geographical, demographic or behavioural characteristics.
Once you have this information on your customers you can start to create user personas. These are characters you create based on the understanding you currently have of your audience and your picture of the ideal customer.
You can create multiple personas for different types of customer groups. Each persona has a profile that represents that customer group and displays information such as demographics, likes, dislikes, motivation and general information on that person.
User personas are incredibly helpful to help guide your marketing activities based on your audience. As you create campaigns you will use the persona to see how the activities will fit the user’s personality.
Defining marketing initiatives
Marketing initiatives are the campaigns, marketing activities and tasks you will conduct to help achieve your overall strategy. At this stage we are breaking down the goals to see how we can achieve them through day-to-day tasks.
Defining these initiatives in alignment with the strategy helps us to have a focus on our marketing effort and ensure all work conducted has a purpose.
If we had a goal to increase revenue one of our marketing initiatives might be to create a series of webinars demonstrating the service we can offer. From here we would look at a campaign plan to understand what will be involved in the webinar, how we will conduct this, the user persona to target, advertising and sign up to the webinar and how we will follow up after the event.
Conduct market analysis
Marketing analysis looks at the target market you are aiming for and evaluates the opportunity. Typical areas you might evaluate here include the size of the market, potential growth, competition, external influences and any challenges.
There are a number of strategic approaches you can take here to conduct the market analysis, one of them being a SWOT analysis. This will look at your strengths in a particular market, weaknesses, opportunities and treats.
You can also use a PESTEL analysis to review the political factors of your market, economic, social factors, technological factors, environmental and legal factors. Breaking the analysis down in this way prompts you to ask questions and cover a multitude of areas.
Define the marketing budget
The marketing budget is a key part of the strategy and can help to define campaigns and set realistic expectations as to what can be achieved. In theory we would review the business goals, define our marketing strategy and then state what the budget will be to achieve this.
In reality however the budget is often the starting point given by financial directors. We then evaluate the business goals and see what we can achieve through our marketing within the constraints of the budget set.
Conclusion
We can now see the key tasks required and the benefits of planning and creating a marketing strategy. The strategy should align with the business goals and should fully understand the market and audience we want to target.
Pulling together this information we can plan SMART marketing campaigns that have vision, purpose and can be measured to evaluate success.
If you’re looking for assistance creating your marketing strategy or want to discuss how this could be achieved, then get in touch today via our contact page. We can setup an initial call to understand your requirements and see how the strategy can be developed.
Or if you want to read more about marketing strategy take a look at our full guide - read more.
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