Creating a marketing strategy is essential for any business looking to expand its reach and increase awareness in this constantly-changing digital landscape. With new channels and trends emerging and fading out with every turn you make, it can be hard to keep up and focus on what matters. Many business owners can get caught up in the fun and exciting trends, but forget to set a solid foundation to grow on. There are many ingredients to creating a successful and effective marketing strategy, but first, what is a marketing strategy and why is it so important?
A marketing strategy is essentially a business’s overall game plan for reaching prospects and turning them into clients by promoting its services and engaging with its community across a wide range of marketing channels. It usually includes things like objectives, target audience data, brand messaging guidelines, customer personas, and key metrics to measure success. A marketing strategy is important for many reasons, it will:
- Align your team’s vision and identify clear goals to work towards
- Ensure your efforts are part of a long-term objective
- Allow you to focus on more timely things and stay on top of trends
- Teach you about your audience and how to effectively communicate with them
- Empower you to provide value and stand out from your competitors
Creating Your Strategy
1. Set clear objectives
It’s crucial to the success of your marketing strategy that you identify your overall business goals and set clear goals for your marketing efforts. This can include increasing sales, growing your email list, or driving more traffic to your website. We recommend using the SMART goal framework for creating attainable and measurable goals for your strategy. SMART stands for: Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely, meaning your goals should specifically state what your objective is, how to measure it, and its deadline. First, you should determine your overall business goals, which should help guide your marketing objectives.
2. Identify your target audience
The only thing more important than your objectives is your audience because they are the ones who keep you in business. Clients are the reason a business is successful. In order to effectively sell your product to your target audience, you have to understand them and what they value. There is no better way to understand your audience than conducting a target audience analysis. This will help you discover your audience’s demographics and psychographics, essentially what kind of person they are and what they value. Take the next step and create a few customer personas to help you visualize your ideal customer and humanize the data. Remember, you may only see numbers and percentages, but these are real people.
3. Clarify your messaging
In order to effectively sell your product to your target audience, you have to communicate the value of your product to them in a way that will resonate with them. After conducting a target audience analysis, you should know exactly what your audience values and how to get their attention. There are many ways to communicate your value, but the best way to create a value proposition, which will clearly communicate to the customer what you do and why they should care.
4. Choose your channels
The marketing channels that you use are crucial to reaching your target audience. Even the best messaging needs to be spread across the appropriate channels, or it won’t reach the right people. Your marketing channels should be determined by where your audience’s attention is and the type of content you want to make. Different channels require different types of content. Some businesses prefer creating blog posts on their website, some prefer posting on social media.
5. Define your budget
Often overlooked, the budget is a huge part of a marketing strategy. It determines where you disperse your funds for promoting your marketing materials. There are many different ways to set up your budget, but it needs to be tailored to your business’s specific needs. Are you planning on using paid advertising, or sticking with organic? Will you be advertising on social media or websites? How much will it cost to actually create the content? Will you need a photographer or designer? Your budget will determine what you can afford to do.
6. Analyze your competition
You can learn a lot from the competition. Whether they’re successful or not, a competitor can provide you with valuable lessons and insight at no cost to you or your business. It just takes doing a little homework. Conducting a competitive analysis will enable you to identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. You can analyze their mistakes and successes to learn what works and what doesn’t in your market. Study their messaging, branding, content strategy, marketing channels, and whatever else you can find that will help gain a competitive edge.
7. Create a content strategy
Creating a strategy for your content can save you a lot of time and headaches when it comes to actually creating and publishing content for your marketing channels. A content strategy includes things like content ideas, objectives, a content calendar, and types/formats of content, as well as determining processes for creating and publishing the content. This will enable you to stay consistent and clearly communicate your messaging.
8. Define your key metrics
The only way to determine if your marketing efforts are successful is to define how you’ll measure that success. Key metrics are used to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. These can include conversion rates, traffic, audience engagement, customer acquisition costs, or open rates. It’s crucial to identify these metrics in your marketing objectives to determine its success. By including key metrics in your strategy, you’ll be able to understand how well your strategy is working.
Common Strategies and Emerging Trends
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- SMS marketing
- Influencer/affiliate marketing
- Search engine optimization
- User-generated content
- Video/audio content
It’s easy to get caught up in trends and tactics, but make sure you do the boring stuff first. That will enable you to take advantage of emerging trends and strategies much more effectively. Think about your marketing strategy as a tree. In order for the tree to grow and reach out, it must first plant its roots and gain a stable foundation. A marketing strategy is the same way, you must set clear goals and understand your audience before launching your next sales campaign.