Creating a Winning Marketing Strategy: A Step-by-Step Guide

In today's business world, having a solid marketing strategy is crucial for any company's success. A marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines a company's overall marketing goals and how they plan to achieve them. This plan is not just a one-time activity, but rather an ongoing process of analyzing, planning, implementing, and measuring marketing efforts to ensure that they align with the company's objectives and target market.

On average, today's marketer spends 19 of every 20 dollars on paid efforts that do not produce a return on investment. Without a clear marketing strategy in place, companies risk losing focus and direction in their marketing efforts, resulting in wasted time, resources, and budget. It's essential to develop and follow a marketing strategy to effectively promote products or services, increase brand awareness, and achieve business growth.

Developing and following a marketing strategy can provide a swath of benefits for your company's success. One benefit includes  providing a better understanding of your target audience and their needs. Through market research and identifying the target audience, companies can tailor their marketing efforts to meet those needs more effectively, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. The most productive way to accomplish this is working with your marketing and sales teams to develop a series of buyer personas within your target markets. 

Another benefit of a marketing strategy is that it helps establish a clear and consistent brand message that resonates with the target audience. A consistent brand message builds trust and credibility with customers and helps to differentiate a company from its competitors. This, in turn, can lead to increased effectiveness of marketing efforts and a higher return on investment (ROI).

A well-executed marketing strategy can lead to a higher ROI by attracting new customers, increasing sales, and building long-term customer relationships. Effective marketing efforts can help a company achieve its business objectives and drive growth simultaneously. Developing a marketing strategy that focuses on building long-term relationships with customers can result in increased customer retention and loyalty, and consistently delivering value to customers and addressing their needs. A solid marketing strategy can support companies' efforts to create loyal customer bases that can help produce recurrent business opportunities as well as referrals.

Your Marketing Strategy Framework

1. Do Your Homework
   To develop an effective marketing strategy, companies should conduct thorough market research to gain a better understanding of the target audience and their needs. By conducting research, companies can identify key trends, preferences, and behaviors of their target audience and use this information to develop a tailored marketing strategy. A good place to start is looking at what's worked for you with previous client acquisition efforts and synthesize the winning characteristics into a persona you can target. 
2. State Your Intentions
   Next, companies should establish their marketing goals and objectives. This step involves identifying what the company wants to achieve through its marketing efforts, such as increasing sales, driving traffic to the website, or building brand awareness. Whatever you set out to do, you should call it out specifically, and have a clear plan on how you expect to accomplish your goal. Be careful not to create a one-size-fits-all campaign. The more specific and intentional you can be about what the campaign is designed to accomplish, the more likely you'll be able to run, measure, update, and succeed in your efforts. If that means running multiple campaigns, so be it - just make sure each has a specific purpose.
3. Identify your mix
   After setting marketing goals and objectives, companies should create a marketing mix that includes product, price, place, and promotion. This step involves determining what products or services to offer, how to price them, where to distribute them, and how to promote them to the target audience.
4. Name your price
   Companies should develop a budget and timeline for their marketing strategy. This step involves determining how much money to allocate to different marketing channels and tactics and creating a timeline for implementing each strategy. Make sure you identify the reasoning behind the marketing spend, and back it up with data to ensure objectivity when it comes to running paid campaigns - your "gut", just isn't going to get it done. 
5. Measure, measure, measure
   Companies should measure and evaluate the results of their marketing efforts. To measure your efforts, you should have a clear expectation of what you expect your campaigns to do, or deliver. This includes using the the specific mechanisms you plan defined in step 2, to use to compare progress and measure success. A few examples of KPIs (not in any particular order) include tracking and analyzing website traffic, lead generation numbers, and sales opportunities generated through your marketing to determine whether the marketing strategy is meeting its goals and objectives. Each organization should set their own KPIs that best align with their own strategic goals across functions. 

The Last Bit

Companies that follow these steps can create a comprehensive and effective marketing strategy that aligns with their business objectives and target audiences, a crucial factor to overall marketing a sales success. A marketing strategy enables companies to identify and understand their target audience, establish a clear and consistent brand message, and allocate resources more efficiently to achieve their business objectives. Through careful research and planning, companies can create a marketing mix that includes product, price, place, and promotion, and develop a budget and timeline for implementing their marketing efforts. Despite the challenges companies may face in following a marketing strategy, such as changing market conditions and limited resources, the benefits of a well-executed marketing strategy, including increased ROI, customer retention, and loyalty, provide the business proof case that a marketing strategy is a valuable investment. By consistently measuring and evaluating the results of their marketing efforts, companies can refine and improve their strategies to achieve long-term success.

Have more questions or need some help getting started? Contact us to start your journey towards a more strategic and aligned marketing approach