Creating a marketing strategy is crucial to effectively nurture your customers, boost the bottom line of your business, and increase the ROI of your efforts.
A marketing strategy is especially critical if you want to advantage of the highest-ROI trends for 2023: short video, influencer marketing, branded social media, etc. To get powerful results, you must carefully weave both proven strategies and emerging trends into your plan.
Let’s dip into the critical components of a complete marketing strategy in 2023, followed by a few examples for inspiration.
What is Marketing Strategy?
A marketing strategy is a detailed, structured plan of a company’s promotional strive across a broad range of platforms and channels. Also, a marketing strategy generally includes objectives, content creation steps, target audience profiles, key performance indicators, and other components.
A marketing strategy will:
- Aline your team to specific goals.
- Help you tie your strive to business objectives.
- Allow you to recognize and test what resonates with your target audience.
- Empower you to capitalise on emerging trends.
The last one is especially vital for this upcoming year. Keeping up with marketing trends is crucial for your strategy, however, could be a full-time job.
Why? Because in one year alone, we have seen a huge shift to short-form video content, the rise and fall of new platforms (looking at you, Meta); and the continuing effect of the global pandemic. In short, what worked for your marketing strategy in the past may not work for you today.
To succeed in the rapid-paced marketing world — and maintain a sense of relevancy with your audience — it’s crucial to stay ahead of the curve.
To help ease some of that Incertitude, we have going to show you step-by-step how to create a marketing strategy that leaves no stone unturned. But first, let’s take a look at the individual components that make up a strong marketing strategy.
Marketing Strategy Components
- Marketing Mix [4 Ps of Marketing]
- Marketing Objectives
- Marketing Budget
- Competitive Analysis
- Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning
- Content Creation [Including Trending Content]
- Metrics and Key Performance Indicators
1. Marketing Mix [4 Ps of Marketing]
The marketing mix, known as the 4 Ps of marketing, is the preliminary document you must create to know what you will be marketing, where you will be marketing it, and how you will be marketing it. Following P’s make up this framework:
- Product: What are you selling
- Price: What is the price
- Place: Where do you sell your products?
- Promotion: Where do you advertise your products?
You can then extrapolate this information to come up with a full-fledged marketing plan for all your advertising channels. It’s vital to lay out the information in broad strokes so that you know the overall direction of your marketing strategy.
2. Marketing Objectives
You can set marketing goals in conjunction with or immediately after the 4Ps. Either way, before formulating your marketing strategy, you should outline your marketing goals. why? This is because goals influence other aspects of your plan, such as your budget and content creation process.
With all objectives, you should aim to be as conspicuous as possible. Try to create SMART marketing goals divided by channel or promotional strategy, and don’t forget that you can always come back and amend your goals as your priorities change.
3. Marketing Budget
A marketing budget is an important element of your strategy. Without allotting funds to hiring the right talent, using the right software or tool, advertising on the right channels, and creating the right content, your marketing strategy won’t have a strong effect. To get a high return on investment, you have to invest first.
Remember, you can always start small by focusing your budget on one or two efforts, and then build up once you see the ROI.
4. Competitive Analysis
Knowing your competition is essential when creating a marketing strategy. Else, you risk “shouting into the void” without measurable results. Worse, you won’t know whether you are differentiating yourself sufficiently from the competition and effectively drawing the attention of your intended audience.
You might already know who your competitors are, but it’s still important to sit down and identify them. You may end up discovering surprising competitors vying for the engagement and attention of your target buyers.
5. Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning
Segmentation, targeting, and positioning refer to the process of “delivering more relevant and personalized messages to your audience”. In other words, instead of creating posts and ads on a whim, go through a methodical process to create content that resonates with your target buyers.
During the segmentation, targeting, and positioning process (STP), you will take three steps:
- Identify your target audience: This process involves not only interviewing current customers but also conducting market research and creating a buyer persona.
- Target a segment of your target audience: It’s better to talk to a small group of good buyers than to get your message across to everyone.
- Position your brand relative to other brands: What makes you better than your competitors? It’s critical to map this information when creating a marketing strategy.
6. Content Creation
Once you have your budget, competitive outlook, and Segmentation, targeting, and positioning information, it’s now time to take the most important step: Creating your marketing content. But it’s vital to undertake this effort strategically.
For one, you don’t want to publish random content that doesn’t solve for the customer, and for two, you should aim to capitalise on emerging trends so that your brand enjoys high visibility in the marketplace.
Competition is tough across all formats. Pursuance of HubSpot Research, “Half of the marketers use video, 47% use images, followed by 33% using blog posts, infographics (30%), podcasts, or other audio content (28%). ) utilize.
. Of these, videos have the highest ROI.
It’s even more crucial to invest in trends that have a high ROI, like short-form videos, influencer marketing, and social media DMs.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest in one of the most proven content marketing techniques, blogging. It’s just important to understand where to allot the major resources, especially if you have a limited budget.
7. Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Last, but certainly not least, your marketing strategy must include metrics and key performance indicators to know how well your strategies are working. The Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you select will vary depending on your business type and preferred customer acquisition channels. An instance of KPIs include:
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
- Conversion Rate
- Organic Traffic
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
Now, let’s dip into why it’s crucial to follow the steps of a marketing strategy
The Importance of Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy Steps
A powerful marketing strategy will reach your target audience — this includes those who’ve never heard of your brand all the way to repeat customers.
Without a defined strategy, you will crucially be throwing things to the wall to see what sticks. And it is costing you cost, time, and resources.
There are seven critical steps to developing a successful marketing strategy. Plan your marketing strategy, create buyer personas, select tools, review existing resources, identify goals, review and plan media campaigns, and finally execute strategy.
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