How to Create a Marketing Strategy Part One
A great marketing strategy can make all the difference in success or failure for your organization. These topics can be daunting which is why this article is written with simplicity and ease of execution in mind.
What is a Marketing Strategy — The Expert’s Definition
We asked our Director of Strategy, Ricki Yael Subel-Lobato for a definition of a marketing strategy and here is what she fired back at me, (in several seconds I might add).
“One of the simplest, and yet most overlooked concepts in modern business, a marketing strategy is when you have a goal and then devise a carefully thought-out plan to reach that goal. This plan takes multiple elements into account, including branding and messaging, products and pricing, channels, and budget.”
Your marketing strategy will:
• focus your team on the core objectives
• provide the ability to A/B test messaging with your audiences
• give you confidence to plow ahead as performance increases.
While your marketing strategy will define your long-term goals and approach, your marketing plan will define specific actions and tactics to measure and meet your goals in a concise timeframe.
Who is Your Audience?
Starting here is crucial because it will frame everything you do after this point. You’ve got to know who you are talking to before you start talking, right? Combining competitive analysis with your customer analysis provides wonderful clarity on how to dial in your messaging and offers. You’ll want to create personas for your customers that provide specific demographic and behavioral data that helps you understand them as clearly as possible.
Knowing your audience is so important we recently wrote three articles about this topic which are listed here:
One tip from this article is make the competitive information come to you by signing up for newsletters, RSS feeds from the websites and following your competitors’ social channels. Less work is always good.
Do You Really Know Your Customers?
A highlight here is studying your site analytics and user forums to understand your customer needs. Another RSS tip is you can pull in competing website pages with FetchRSS.
This article discusses a host of methods to know what your customers want including discussions with your support team who probably knows your customers quite well.
Include Everyone that Counts for Your Marketing Strategy Sessions
Don’t exclude people that can provide valuable information for your strategy! People have different viewpoints and opinions. Get it all out there on the table to mold a plan. Anyone that is customer facing should be obvious. Don’t forget your social media administrator or your sales team. They should have different input based on their varied roles with customers.
What Are Your Marketing Objectives?
Work as a team to define your top goals but be careful about focusing on too many. We like to use the term “shameless goal” because that is typically revenue. Even non-profits need income, so their shameless goal is very similar.
To take a deeper look at goals and ways to measure them, we have another article, actually three of them starting with this one on understanding your goals (Key Performance Indicators).
Understanding KPI Data and How to Use It — Part One
What Have You Done So Far?
I know this is obvious, but hey we’re getting into the fine details now, so we won’t assume anything. If you currently have data that is relevant, study it and analyze it for insights and add this to your discussion planning talks.
You might have data that you aren’t aware of. We encourage all of our website clients to allow us to set up the conversion events in Google Analytics for their new site regardless of whether we are helping them with marketing or not.
Did you run a social sale campaign over the holidays? All relevant information is important to study for your marketing strategy. The articles on KPIs above really help you see exactly what you are paying for with ads, how you can get your costs down and provide some predictions for spends for your marketing strategy.
Develop Your Value Proposition
As Ricki said above, messaging is crucial for a great marketing strategy. Following the sequence of tasks here, you now know who you want to talk to and what makes your audiences tick.
It’s now time to create that incredibly important message of what you do differently and better than the competition. This is THE cornerstone of all of our work with our clients and should be yours too.
As you might have guessed by now, we have an article for this too. This one is on the Rolling Stone site in the Culture Council and you can find it here.
Hopefully this will provide some motivation for this step: few companies have a great value proposition! Develop a great one and things are much easier.
Stay Tuned for Part Two
We’re going to dig deeper into this in part two. Click here to read all of our articles.
Other Articles You Might Be Interested In
Content Collaboration and Co-Marketing Part One
How to Create a Content Marketing Plan for Lead Generation Part One
