Want to grow your business amidst the increasing competition? You need a strong and effective marketing strategy to do so.
A well-planned strategy can help you foster a strong relationship with customers and increase ROI at the same time. As the marketing trends are shifting towards strategies like short videos, reels, and influencer marketing, it is even more important to create a marketing plan.
So, how do you get started?
That’s what we are here for! In this article, we’ll show you how to create a complete marketing strategy in six simple steps.
What is a Marketing Strategy?
Marketing strategy refers to your company’s overall approach to promoting the brand, products, and services to the target audience. It is a lengthy process that includes setting goals, identifying the target audience, creating content, and more.
In the past few years, the industry has changed drastically, and the things that once worked for you might not give the same results. For this reason, it is best to hire a digital marketing agency to help you create next-level marketing strategies.
Steps to Create a Marketing Strategy
Follow these six simple steps to establish a complete marketing strategy from scratch:
Step 1: Market research and goal-setting
Before you initiate building your marketing strategy, you need data to set your goals and make important decisions. Market research can help you with this. Remember to allocate a marketing budget before you start building the strategy.
The market keeps on changing with time and new trends, so you need to research what works with the audience in the present time. It will ease you to identify your target audience as well as make data-driven decisions.
Once you know about the market, set your marketing goals and objectives. Ask yourself about what you want to achieve through marketing. It can be anything, from increasing sales to building a strong customer base. Your goals should be clear and achievable.
It is even better if you use numbers to define your goals. For instance – increasing ROI by 20% by the end of 2024. A set of clear goals will guide your marketing efforts in the right direction.
Step 2: Know your target audience and create buyer personas
To plan and execute your marketing strategy, you need to identify your target audience. Market research will help you determine who are ideal customers are. You can use demographic data to see who and what products and services are suitable.
After you determine your target audience, you need to put yourself in their shoes and understand what they want. It is not just about their needs. You need to dig deeper and find out how your business and actually offer a solution to their problems.
Knowing this key detail will help you to present your products and services in such a manner that it easily resonates with the audience. You can prepare a buyers persona for this purpose. It will contain all the information about your target audience’s age, income, location, job, challenges, and interests.
Step 3: Analyze your competitors
Competitors play a very important role in creating a marketing strategy. You need to know who your competitors are and what type of strategy they are using.
Competitor analysis includes identifying your top competitors and checking their websites, ads, content, social media, and pricing. It will help you to spot their weakness and capitalize on it. You can easily use the data to set your brand apart in a better way.
With all the information available, you can set your pricing and choose the right channel to promote your brand. It will give you insights on what to do and what not to do with your marketing plan.
Step 4: Create key messaging
This step may not really seem important, but there is where you can set yourself ahead. Now that you know who are potential customers and competitors are, you need to develop a unique value proposition.
You will create key messaging that will highlight the strong points of your products or services. Write the benefits in such a way that it resonates with your audience. It should include research work to back your statements. You can make it creative and experiment with the latest trends.
The key messaging will give credibility to your brand and help you foster an emotional connection with your audience. The message should be such that it influences their buying decision.
Step 5: Select your marketing channels
This is one of the most important steps in building a marketing strategy. You need to choose the best marketing channels to reach your audience. Your choice of channels should depend on the buyer persona and the type of platform your target audience prefers.
For example – if your target audience is working-class people, LinkedIn is the best channel you can use.
You can go for a mix of digital as well as traditional channels like email marketing, social media marketing, TV ads, content marketing, etc. Start with the channels where you already have a strong presence, and then keep on adding new networks as per the trend.
Let’s divide the channels into three categories.
| Media Type | Description | Examples |
| Paid Media | These are channels where you have to spend money to attract the target audience. It mostly includes different types of ads. | ● Television
● Direct mail ● Billboards ● Social media ads ● SEM ● Podcast advertising |
| Owned Media | These are online channels owned by your brand. It includes media created by the marketing team. | ● Blogs
● Websites ● Organic social media ● Videos ● Podcasts ● Ebooks ● Infographics |
| Earned Media | It includes user-generated content or mentions about your brand shared by the audience. | ● Social media shares
● Posts on forums or threads ● Instagram reels mentioning your brand |
Step 6: Choose measurable KPIs to track performance
The last and find step is to decide how you will check if the marketing strategy is working or not. To do this, you need to create measurable key performance indicators. Review your entire strategy and choose KPIs that you can track to measure the efficiency of your marketing efforts.
Create an analytics system that helps you to check the performance of your marketing campaigns from time to time. It will help you to make necessary changes and refine your strategy.
Conclusion
These are the key six steps you need to follow to create a complete marketing strategy. Once your strategy is ready, you can put it together and start creating marketing campaigns to achieve your goals. The process can take time, and if you follow the steps correctly, it will eventually lead to success.
FAQs
1. What are the main marketing trends for 2023?
Short-form videos on TikTok reels on Instagram and podcasts are a few marketing trends.
2. Why is marketing important?
It helps you to increase brand awareness, face competitors, and boost sales.
3. What is the ideal marketing budget?
The marketing budget can be anywhere around 5 to 25 percent of your total revenue.
