The short answer is YES! If you want to achieve measurable results from your marketing efforts then you absolutely need to create a strategy. You need to know where your business is going and be really clear on how you plan to get there.
What is a marketing strategy?
A marketing strategy lays out your approach to achieving your competitive advantage. It should detail what you want to happen, as a result of your marketing activities. This includes the way in which your business or brand will reach prospective customers in order to convert them into actual customers.
What is the purpose of a marketing strategy?
The primary purpose of a marketing strategy is to define clear marketing goals.
Ask yourself: What does your business or brand need to do to ensure that your product or service reaches the right people?
By clearly defining your brand proposition (what makes your brand so great), your offering (your products, services, price points etc.) and fully understanding your audiences, you can create a far more effective marketing plan.
At this point it is worth a pause to consider the difference between the marketing strategy and the marketing plan.
Marketing strategy vs marketing plan
Clients will often confuse the process of developing a marketing strategy with creating a marketing plan. Whilst it’s certainly the case that one doesn’t work without the other, they have two distinct purposes:
If a marketing strategy lays out your goals and your approach to achieving competitive advantage, then the marketing plan details the marketing activities you will undertake to help you to reach those goals.
A marketing plan….
details when and how you will achieve the goals you set out in your strategy.
outlines and the initiatives (campaigns for example) you will use on your chosen platforms to reach your customers to engage them.
includes the metrics you will use to measure success.
is likely to be centered around a timeline to plan out your campaigns and marketing content.
The marketing plan ensures that all of the stakeholders within your business, who are involved in marketing activities, have complete transparency of what is planned and when.
OK so back to that all important strategy…
What are the advantages of having a marketing strategy?
It ensures that your team is aligned, with shared goals and a shared understanding of what you are setting out to achieve.
It helps to establish a strong brand image. Having a strategy will help you to present your brand in a professional and consistent manner.
It keeps marketing efforts targeted, by simplifying your target audiences, through customer profiling and segmentation.
It keeps the subsequent activities – laid out in a marketing plan – focused.
The 10 key elements you should include in your marketing strategy
It can be difficult to know where to start with creating a strategy from scratch, so I have included the ‘must have’ sections you need to include when laying out your strategy. This is very much positioned for small businesses but can easily be adapted for different applications.
1. Goals
This is the most important part of your strategy. Start by thinking about your business objectives for the next 6, 12, 18 months (e.g. increase revenue by xx%, attract xx% more buyers from xx segment etc.). From there you can start to think about the right marketing goals to support your business objectives.
One note of caution though. Setting a goal to get X hundred leads in the first month might well be unrealistic. Your goals need to be realistic based on the level of brand awareness and engagement you already have amongst the audience you are trying to reach.
Set realistic goals and then continually review the metrics you plan to use to track success as you start to build traction with your marketing activities.
Goals might include:
Building brand awareness
Increasing sales / profit
Targeting a new market segment
Developing brand loyalty
Grow market share / increase competitive advantage
2. Budget
It’s really important to set an annual budget for your marketing. This helps you to make difficult decisions about resourcing (do we need to recruit? should we outsource that activity?) and investment in advertising for example.
Do you know what your competitors are spending? What’s the market norm for your type of business or brand? What percentage of your sales will you allocate to marketing spend?
Ideally you would look at your budget on an annual, quarterly and monthly basis to enable you to adequately allocate budget to different tactics, and to track any overspend over the year.
3. SWOT
In order to better understand your current market position, marketing consultants will often lead you in a SWOT analysis.
S.W.O.T breaks down as:
Strengths – things you do well (ideally better than your competitors), your available resources (e.g. skilled staff members), any tangible assets.
Weaknesses – things you don’t do as well, or your competitors are doing better, resource gaps, lack of a truly ‘unique’ selling point.
Opportunities – potential new markets, less competitive market opportunities, new demand, media coverage, partnerships.
Threats – new competitors, regulatory restrictions, negative brand perceptions.
4. Research
This is the point at which you may research your competitors and your market more to help you to identify your point of difference.
The level of research you undertake depends mostly on your budget. From researching online, to surveying your customers, there are lots of ways to conduct market research.
Our aim is to ensure we have a good understanding of buying habits within your industry. We’re looking at the size of the market, trends of growth (or decline, if relevant) and any other key trends which may be affecting your industry at present.
5. Messaging
Brand messaging is the value proposition I mentioned above, translated into words. It helps to convey the personality of your brand, what you stand for, your point of difference and the attributes that make your brand trustworthy.
The language you use as part of your brand messaging is what helps to motivate your target audience to engage with your brand – and ultimately to buy your product or your services.
When creating marketing strategies for clients, I would include the following within this section:
Positioning statement
Brand promise / mission statement
Tone of voice (and brand personality)
Unique selling points [USPs]
This is all then translated into approximately 6 key messages which should become synonymous with your brand.
6. Audience
This is where we define your ideal target customer/s. There is a fine balance involved in defining the right target audience; too broad and you may struggle to message effectively and differentiate, too narrow and you may reduce your market size down too much.
But don’t worry. You might not get it 100% right first time but that is what testing and refining is all about. Without a costly market research exercise, all we are doing is hypothesizing. As long as you continually revisit your target audience, it’s ok to go make your best guess to start off with.
So where do you start?
I tend to suggest that we start BIG. A good starting point is to think of all of your customers up until now. Which ones have been the most profitable for your business? Which are decision makers and which are influencers? Which are repeat customers?
Then we start to narrow it down. Can you occupy a niche space within your market to reduce the level of competition, and to keep your content and messaging razor-focused? Which of the people above is the most ‘typical’ audience? Which is the most likely to engage with your brand online?
7. Profiling
From there, I would define three customer profiles to represent the three most relevant target audiences. When thinking in online terms, we call these customer profiles user personas.
By personifying your audience in this way, your marketing remains focused on your target audience and their needs. You can test campaign ideas against them, and remove the subjectivity of decision making – instead of asking ‘does our CEO like it?’ we would ask ‘does user persona x like it?’
Details you should include range from;
demographic make up (gender, age, marital status, location etc.) to socio-economic (income/education level, political/world views etc.) and personal attributes (personality, lifestyle, interests).
I would consider their motivations to engage with your brand, but also (and crucially) their potential objections to engaging with your brand.
If you know what is likely to prevent your audience from engaging (their objections) then you can face this head on in your content. All of a sudden they can no longer see any reason to object!
8. Journeys
Once you are happy with your audience you can map out a typical customer’s journey from their first interaction with your brand, to the point at which they are ready to convert.
Marketing’s job is to support your sales process by nurturing these prospects from the point at which they first encounter your brand, to a conversion (buying a product or signing up for your service).
Customer journeys help us to understand what our audiences are thinking at each stage of their ‘buyer journey’. Using that information we can automate processes to meet their needs at each stage, and develop content to overcome their pain points as they progress through to a conversion.
I break this down into:
The awareness phase: Look back at your customer profiles and think about how they are feeling at this point? What problem are they trying to solve with your product or service? What pain points are they facing at this stage?
The consideration phase: Now that the prospect is aware of your brand, what will they be thinking as they consider a purchase? Are they looking at other options? Revieing competitors? What questions might they have?
The decision phase: What is your customer thinking as they reach the decision phase? What can you do to help them to make that final decision? What information do they need from you? What might prevent them from making that final decision to buy?
9. Tactics
Great stuff. You have outlined your position and what makes you different. You know how you want to be perceived – and by whom – and what you hope to achieve from your marketing.
You have the core of your strategy and you’re ready to look at the entire marketplace and think tactics. Tactics might include:
PR & Events
Content strategy
Social media
SEO/PPC
Social media
Webinars
Advertising
Direct mail / Print Collateral
Email
10. Metrics
I am truly amazed by the number of clients who tell me that previous marketing advisors, or outsourced agencies, have failed to track the success of their marketing efforts.
In order to justify their marketing budgets, marketers should be setting clear measures for the success of their marketing.
Marketing experts should be able to answer the question: ‘What sort of ROI can we expect from marketing this quarter, and then how will that increase, as awareness of our brand increases?’
Appropriate metrics should be used for each of your tactics, and then key performance indicators (KPIs) should be set in order to measure success. These metrics should be set by whoever is running that element of the marketing plan.
For example:
If you are outsourcing paid advertising to a PPC expert, they should be agreeing to metrics such as ‘clicks’ on your ads, ‘click through rates’ and – ideally – the lifetime value of a customer.
It should be understood that these metrics are estimates. Only once the marketing tactic has been running for at least 6 months can you truly have enough data to measure its impact. That’s why we are constantly analysing and reviewing the data.
Using analytics, these metrics should be reviewed regularly and reported on frequently.
You will start to see trends forming – this enables you to build on those tactics that are delivering results, such as an increase in email sign ups, increase brand awareness or sales.
You can also review any areas where the marketing efforts appear to be under-forming. Why might this be happening? Is the related content right? Can you test it? What changes could you make to improve performance.
Marketing Strategies: in summary
Without a marketing strategy it is difficult to align internal stakeholders – from creatives to sales teams, finance and from technical teams to C-level decision makers.
Without it, you risk presenting your brand in an inconsistent way, diluting your message – as you’re unclear on who you should be targeting – and achieving a far lower return on investment for your marketing.
Imagine this scenario instead:
You have a clearly defined marketing strategy, which has been shared with the whole team. It sits perfectly alongside your sales strategy, so that they work together to deliver results.
The leads you generate are nurtured though a pre-defined process. Some stages are automated, the content is tailored to your audience, consistent and written perfectly in line with your brand’s positioning.
You are monitoring and measuring the success of your marketing efforts and can prove the return on investment [ROI]. Most importantly you are successfully achieving the goals you set out to achieve!
You can find out more about my marketing services here. Or if you’d like help with your marketing strategy, please feel free to contact me, and we can set up a discovery call to see how I can help.
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