The Meaning and Importance of Marketing Strategy.

WHAT IS MARKETING STRATEGY?

Marketing strategy is the comprehensive plan formulated particularly for achieving the marketing objectives of the organization. It provides a blueprint for attaining these marketing objectives. It is the building block of a marketing plan.

It is designed after detailed marketing research. A marketing strategy helps an organization to concentrate its scarce resources on the best possible opportunities so as to increase the sales.

A marketing strategy is designed by:

1. Choosing the target market: By target market we mean to whom the organization wants to sell its products and services. Not all the market segments are fruitful to an organization. There are certain market segments which guarantee quick profits, there are certain segments which may be having great potential but there may be high barriers to entry. A careful choice has to be made by the organization or company. An In-depth marketing research has to be done of the traits of the buyers and the particular needs of the buyers in the target market.
2. Marketing objectives in a marketing strategy, your objectives outline the specific goals you want to achieve with your marketing efforts. They highlight exactly what you’re trying to accomplish, such as increased brand visibility and awareness, improved reputation, higher credibility, increased sales, and better audience retention.
3. Metrics and KPIs A good marketing strategy should provide insight into the key metrics and key performance indicators you need to track to determine whether your marketing campaigns are successful. They’ll give you behind-the-scenes insights into what you need to monitor and analyse when optimizing your campaigns.
4. Segmentation, targeting and positioning marketing strategies also include “STP” documents, which highlight your target audience, and the specific segment of customers you want to reach, as well as the position of your brand in relation to other companies. In other words, they define what makes you unique in your industry.
5. Competitive analysis Most marketing strategies will also provide insight into the competitors in your market. They can include insights into the marketing tactics your competitors are already using, their target audience, as well as their strengths and weaknesses.
6. Marketing budget Your budget defines exactly how much money and resources you’re willing to dedicate to each part of your promotional strategy. It looks at funds allocated to hiring the right talent, using the correct software, and promoting on various channels.
7. Gathering the marketing mix: By marketing mix we mean how the organization proposes to sell its products and services. The organization or the company has to gather the four P’s of marketing which are: Product; Price; Promotion; and Place in appropriate combination. Gathering the marketing mix is a crucial part of marketing task. Various decisions have to be made such as -

What is the most appropriate mix of the four P’s in a given situation

What distribution channels are available, and which one should be used

What developmental strategy should be used in the target market

How should the price structure be designed

IMPORTANCE OF MARKETING STRATEGY

So, why is it so important to learn how to develop a marketing strategy? The simple answer is that marketing strategies give you focus and direction. A robust strategy will ensure you can effectively reach your target audience and get the best ROI (Return on Investment) from each campaign. Without a marketing strategy, you’re really just “guessing” at what might work. You won’t be able to effectively monitor whether your influencer campaigns are driving results or determine why one campaign might work better than another.

In fact, marketing strategies are so effective at generating positive results studies have shown companies with a documented strategy are more likely to report being successful.

1. Marketing strategy provides an organization an edge over its competitors.
2. Strategy helps in developing goods and services with best profit-making potential.
3. Marketing strategy helps in discovering the areas affected by organizational growth and thereby helps in creating an organizational plan to cater to the customer needs.
4. It helps in fixing the right price for organization’s goods and services based on information collected by market research.
5. Strategy ensures effective departmental co-ordination.
6. It helps an organization to make optimum utilization of its resources so as to provide a sales message to its target market.
7. A marketing strategy helps to fix the advertising budget in advance, and it also develops a method which determines the scope of the plan, i.e., it determines the revenue generated by the advertising plan.

HOW TO DEVELOP A MARKETING STRATEGY: STEP BY STEP

Now we’ve determined what a marketing strategy is and why it’s so important, it’s time to start looking at how you can develop your own. As mentioned above, marketing strategies can differ depending on your unique approach to promotion. However, there are some core steps virtually every business should consider. Let’s dive in.

Step 1: Define Business Goals and Objectives

The first step in developing any successful marketing strategy is understanding exactly what you want to achieve. The goals you set for your marketing efforts can vary from one campaign to the next. For instance, you might decide your core goal for a content marketing campaign is to raise brand awareness and visibility, while your influencer strategy is designed to boost your credibility. Setting goals is crucial because it provides you with a clear vision to work towards. With the right goals, you’ll know how to monitor your progress and define when your campaigns are successful.

The best marketing goals will always be SMART; in other words, they should be:

Specific: Don’t just say you want your marketing strategy to increase sales. Determine exactly how much of a profit increase you want to see, what products you want to promote, and how you’re going to convert and attract customers.

Measurable: Your marketing strategies should always be easy to measure. Define the core KPIs and metrics associated with success in each campaign. For instance, if your goal is to increase engagement, you might track likes, shares, and mentions across social media.

Achievable: Setting lofty goals for your marketing campaigns is great, but it’s important to ensure you can really achieve them. Ensure you have the resources you need in place to actually accomplish your targets.

Realistic/Relevant: Your marketing goals should be connected to your wider business targets and brand vision. They should also be realistic, based on the resources, budget, and abilities your team and employees have.

Time-Bound: Part of making sure your goals are specific is by using a deadline calculator or choosing a date for when you want to achieve them. A good SMART Goal might be: We want to increase our social media engagement levels by 20% in the next 3 months.

Step 2: Conducting Market Research

Market research is one of the most important and time-consuming components of any marketing strategy. It involves collecting as much information as possible about the “market” in which you operate. This means you need to understand not just who your customers are but also what kind of trends are affecting your industry, who your competitors are, and where opportunities lie. A good way to conduct market research is with “PESTEL” analysis. This stands for: Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal. To conduct a PESTEL analysis, you’ll need to consider how each of these factors can influence your position in the market and your strategy for reaching your audience. PESTEL Analysis (PEST Analysis) EXPLAINED with EXAMPLES | B2U

For instance, from a social perspective, you might note your customers are more likely to collect information about brands from social media than they are to use search engines (this is true in the Gen Z landscape today). From a technical perspective, you may need to consider what kind of tools and resources you’ll need to use to conduct your marketing campaigns, such as social media listening tools, email automation tools, market research tools, and SEO software. A good approach to market research will also involve taking a closer look at your competitors. In other words, identify who your core competitors are, and find out exactly what kind of customers they’re trying to reach and which marketing strategies they’re using. For instance, in the marketing landscape, you may identify some as a competitor and note they produce content to attract their audiences, such as webinars, blogs, videos, and podcasts.

Step 3: Identifying and Understanding Your Target Audience

Audience analysis is sometimes included as part of a comprehensive market evaluation. However, identifying and understanding your target audience is often a significant task in its own right. Every business has a specific audience, or target market, made up of people most likely to benefit from their services or solutions. Knowing your target audience is how you ensure you can create personalized, relevant campaigns which resonate with your chosen market. The best way to ensure you fully understand who you’re going to be serving is to create a set of buyer personas. These are documents outlining the psychographic, demographic, and behavioural attributes of your ideal customer. Your buyer personas should outline as much information as possible about your customers, including:

Their location: Where are your customers most likely to be located? Are you running a small local company only capable of supporting nearby consumers, or do you operate a global brand? If your customers are located in different regions, does their cultural or geographical background influence their buying behaviours in any way?

Demographics: How old are your customers, on average? What’s their gender identity, and how do they define themselves? Do they belong to a specific educational or income group? Do they have a certain occupation or family life?

Behavioural information: What are the key behavioural characteristics of your customers? How do they research and buy products or services? Do they prefer to shop offline or online? Are they driven by certain factors, like sustainability or price?

Goals: What do your customers want to accomplish? More importantly, what can your business help them achieve? When buying your products or services, what will be the main value your customer will be looking for?

Pain Points: What kind of pain points do your customers need to overcome before purchasing from you? Are they concerned about pricing, convenience, or customer service? Do they have specific issues that aren’t being addressed by existing companies?

Step 4: Determining your USPs

Based on your market research and customer personas, you should be able to identify some core areas where your business can separate itself from existing companies and brands. Your “Unique Selling Points” are essentially the core values you’re going to be drawing attention to whenever you create a new marketing campaign. They’re what you use to constantly convince your customers you’re the best solution for their specific needs. The best USPs revolve around customer pain points and goals. For instance, if you know your target audience is concerned about high prices for products, but they still want to access sustainable, high-quality items, you may focus on highlighting your ability to deliver eco-friendly items on a budget. Ask yourself exactly what you want to deliver to your target audience. What kind of benefits can you offer that no other business can provide?

Step 5: Budgeting and Allocating Resources

Budgeting can be one of the more challenging aspects of developing a marketing strategy. For the most part, small businesses tend to allocate approximately 2 to 5% of their annual revenue to marketing and promotion in the B2B world. In the B2C world, this percentage is often higher, ranging to about 10%. However, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for budgeting. The first and most important thing to realize is that marketing will always cost money. However, some marketing strategies are more cost-effective than others. For instance, content marketing and SEO can be some of the cheapest ways to generate long-term results for your business. However, they won’t provide the quick results you can expect from more expensive PPC campaigns. The best way to ensure you’re using your budget correctly is to define exactly which forms of marketing are most likely to generate the best ROI for your company. To begin with, you might allocate a small portion of your budget to a range of different campaigns, so you can test to see which options are most lucrative for your brand. As you learn more about things like cost per acquisition and the average lifetime value of customers acquired from different marketing strategies, you’ll be able to update your budget.

Step 6: Crafting a Messaging Strategy

Marketing is really just another form of communication. It involves using carefully crafted messages, in a range of formats, across a variety of platforms to connect with your target audience. Your messaging strategy determines exactly how you’re going to communicate with prospects. It can also outline your strategy for connecting with employees and investors. A good messaging strategy considers more than just how you’re going to talk about your products and services in videos and in marketing blogs. It should outline the core personality that will be baked into everything you produce for your brand. In other words, what do you want people to think and feel when they’re interacting with your business? National Geographic’s messaging strategy revolves around delivering highly informative, entertaining, and educational messages to customers. The company uses storytelling and artistic language to create amazing visuals with words. Innocent, the Smoothies brand, uses humour and playfulness in its messaging strategy to make it appear more approachable to customers. Develop an employee template specifying editorial guidelines aligned with your chosen personality and tone of voice, which will serve as a reference for your employees when crafting messaging for your company. You can also invest in mentorship software to facilitate knowledge transfer and ensure consistent brand messaging across the company.

Step 7: Choosing the Appropriate Channels

Once you know how you’re going to send your messages to your target audience, the next step is figuring out where you’re going to cultivate your presence. There are numerous marketing channels a business can use in today’s landscape. Here are some areas you can consider:

Social media: Social media marketing can include both organic and paid advertising. The right social channels are excellent for building stronger relationships with your target audience. However, it’s important to ensure you’re active on the right platforms. LinkedIn is excellent for B2B interactions, while TikTok is ideal for younger customers.

Paid advertising: Paid advertising campaigns usually consist of PPC advertisements, banner ads, and paid promotions on other websites. These tools can be great for rapidly increasing your online presence. However, you’ll need to ensure you’re positioning yourself on the right channels with the correct strategies. For instance, if you’re advertising on Google, which keywords will you be targeting? Will you be focusing on banner ads or Google shopping?

Influencer and affiliate marketing: Influencer marketing involves working with other credible professionals to boost your online presence. You can connect with social media influencers, bloggers, vloggers, or just thought leaders in your industry. Influencer marketing can also go hand-in-hand with affiliate marketing, which involves paying professionals every time they generate new opportunities for your business.

Email marketing: Emails deliver an average ROI of around every money, which makes them one of the most lucrative marketing tools out there. Email is a great way to draw attention to new products, sales, and promotions hosted by your business. However, it can also be a phenomenal tool for nurturing relationships with customers over time. If you’re planning on using email in your marketing campaigns, you’ll need to think about how you can use webinars, landing pages, and other tools to collect contact details.

SEO and content marketing: Content marketing involves creating high-quality content designed to capture the attention of your audience and provide them with entertaining, valuable insights into relevant topics. It can boost the thought leadership and authority of your brand, as well as help you to rank higher on the search engines. SEO campaigns can require more extensive planning and may require you to think about things like backlinks, technical SEO, and off-page optimization. For an example of a company that knows how to use marketing channels correctly, check out Airbnb – which takes full advantage of the visual capabilities of Instagram: On top of all those common options, you can also consider a range of other marketing channels, such as push notifications and chatbots designed to proactively reach out to customers when they’re already on your website. You might use video marketing and podcasts to connect with audiences more interested in listening to or watching content. Plus, you can experiment with offline advertising, too, using direct mail, banner ads, and even event marketing campaigns.

Step 8: Create Your Marketing Plan

As mentioned above, a marketing plan is a core component of a strong marketing strategy. However, they’re not exactly the same thing. Your marketing strategy provides an overview of your reasons for advertising and how you’re going to accomplish results. Your marketing plan outlines exactly how you’re going to leverage each marketing tactic. For instance, if, like many companies, you plan on investing in content marketing, you’ll need to consider the following:

Who will be responsible for creating the content?

What type of content will you produce? (videos, blogs, podcasts, webinars, whitepapers, infographics, etc.)

When will the content be published? Do you have a specific content calendar in mind? Scheduling your content can help to ensure it reaches customers at the right time.

Where will your content be distributed? Alongside your website, do you want to publish your content on other platforms, such as podcast directories?

Why are you using this marketing strategy? What are your goals, and what are the core KPIs and metrics you need to track along the way?

How will you promote your content? What will you do to ensure you get eyes on your pieces?

Depending on your situation, you may need to start by auditing your current content plan, and determining what topics you need to expand on, what types of content are already effective, and what channels you’re currently using. If you’re starting from scratch, you’ll need to set up editorial guidelines for how to produce your content, decide who will be responsible for creation, editing, and promotion, and build a content calendar for publication.

Step 9: Implementing your Marketing Strategy

At this point, you should have everything you need to start putting your marketing strategy to the test. This means it’s time to begin implementing your campaigns – carefully. Start by creating a document that outlines all the steps you need to take to complete your campaign. In other words, define your strategy and who in your team will be responsible for which steps. Outline who is going to create content and when it needs to be completed. Define which marketing channels you’ll be using and define how you’re going to measure success along the way. For example, imagine you’re running a video software company. Your first marketing strategy might involve promoting a software update due in the middle of the year. At the start of the year, you could create a content marketing strategy that highlights all of the core benefits you’ll be bringing to your customers. After this, you could launch a video campaign, walking users through the new features. You might use an online webinar to teach customers how to use the new features, with advice from industry experts and appearances from influencers. After the launch of your new software updates, you could promote user-generated content from your customers, highlighting how they’ve benefitted from the updates.

Step 10: Measuring and Analysing Results

Your marketing strategy doesn’t end when you implement your first campaign. Once you’ve started rolling out your marketing strategies, you’ll need to monitor their results. If you’ve set your goals carefully, you should have an insight into the core metrics and KPIs you need to monitor to determine whether your campaigns are successful. Using tools to help you track crucial metrics, from engagement levels to conversion rates and revenue, can give you some more useful statistics to work with as you’re developing your marketing plans. Once you have your analytics, you can start using your findings to implement changes. Use A/B testing and split testing strategies to determine how certain changes to your campaigns enhance or optimize your marketing campaigns. Make notes about how different call-to-action buttons in your landing pages or copy in your blogs lead to more revenue and sales.

ARTICULATE GOALS AND TACTICS FOR DIGITAL EXPERIENCES, CHANNELS, CAMPAIGNS AND MEDIA

For most organizations, digital marketing plays an increasingly strategic role in driving business growth. Best-in-class brands relentlessly optimize digital marketing channels and blend digital and physical experiences. They also embrace emerging technologies that provide a competitive edge.

The pandemic radically shifted customer engagement preferences and elevated digital experience to a pivotal role in social and business relationships.

Digital is no longer just a means of enhancing customer relationships; it’s a primary medium for building new connections with target audiences, whether that’s employees, business partners or social influencers.

DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY FRAMEWORK

There is no single digital marketing strategy framework, but key components of any digital marketing strategy include the following:

A vision for the role that digital marketing strategy and execution play in driving enterprise growth. For example, a goal to boost profit could translate into a business objective of increasing customer lifetime value. A resulting marketing objective might be to focus on enhanced customer engagement or strategic upselling.

A clearly scoped and defined set of responsibilities for the digital marketing team and leadership. Digital marketing leaders, for example, set and oversee budgeting, hiring, technology selection and campaign planning in support of strategy execution.

A detailed roadmap that lays out near-term digital marketing program objectives, as well as longer-range performance achievements. Improving lead quality, driving increased sales among identified leads and increasing brand awareness are all key digital marketing objectives tied to the goal of new customer acquisition.

An assessment of team skills, tools and processes needed to support digital marketing objectives — and a plan for closing gaps in performance.

WHY HAVE DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY?

Digital is no longer just a means of enhancing customer relationships; it’s a primary medium for building new connections with target audiences, whether that’s employees, business partners or social influencers. A digital marketing strategy enables brands to scale reach and engagement across websites, social media and digital advertising to target, acquire and retain customers.

WHAT ARE DIGITAL MARKETING TACTICS?

Scaling the delivery of personalized content and experiences across touchpoints is one of marketing’s most important roles in driving effective digital experiences. It’s imperative to align personalization approaches to overall multichannel marketing objectives.

In a nutshell, a marketing strategy clearly explains how an organization reaches its predetermined objectives. A top-notch digital marketing strategy enables brands to scale reach and engagement across websites, social media and digital advertising to target, acquire and retain customers.

Have you ever considered the impact of your content marketing strategy on your business’s success? In today’s digital age, creating engaging content is key to attracting, engaging, and converting potential customers. But, without a solid content marketing plan, your content may not reach its full potential. As your industry partner our proprietary research-based framework OKUTTA’S CONSULT makes a strong impact and accelerates your brand growth while you focus on what you do best – running your business successfully – our team will build your brand, and drive leads. Follow OKUTTA’S CONSULT to find out.

Catch our latest updates here to learn more