The first and most crucial step in your marketing strategy is marking your online territory. By creating a website, you're claiming a digital space that's entirely yours. Next, you'll need to outline your company's growth plan using the right marketing strategies to generate more leads, web traffic and acquire new customers. From influencer marketing and PR to SEO, we'll explore precisely which types of marketing to focus on in 2022 to fuel significant growth for your business.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
Marketing strategy vs. marketing plan
A marketing strategy is a game plan to reach prospective consumers and turn them into customers. The difference between a marketing strategy and a marketing plan or tactic is that a strategy is a bigger picture of how you plan to stay ahead of your competition. In contrast, the marketing plan methodically outlines details of how you will implement your strategies.
Additionally, your marketing plan is highly detailed and involves the four P's of marketing: product, price, place and promotion. While these terms are used interchangeably, marketing strategies are more broad summaries of what your business does to overcome your pain points, meet your goals and reach your audience.
Why a marketing strategy matters
There are plenty of benefits to defining your marketing strategies early on. Setting clear goals and objectives and aligning the marketing strategies to achieve them best sets you up for success.
Furthermore, marketing budgets might be limited when starting a business, and a clear plan ensures you won't waste any resources. Besides, how will you measure success if you don't first establish what it looks like or how you'll get there?
How to create a marketing strategy in 5 steps
01. Define your goals
Data repeatedly shows that those who write down goals achieve more than those who don't. There are several ways to set your objectives, such as using the SMART Goals method.
Your business goals might be to develop your brand awareness, break into a new geographic area, or increase online sales by a given percent. The more specific and numerical these goals are, the better they can be tracked, measured and replicated.
02. Identify your target audience
After you determine exactly whom your business wants to reach, it will be clearer which marketing strategies to choose. That's because the messaging and platforms you'll use need to fit your target audience. Audience parameters can be tied to demographics like age, gender, geographic region, likes, interests, etc. Create different buyer personas or conduct market segmentation to assist you in the process.
03. Understand your customer’s pain points and your value proposition
To develop a marketing strategy that works, you must understand what your ideal consumer struggles with regularly. This awareness will align your product, place, price and promotion to solve their pain points and increase your chances of scalability. Once you’re confident in your value proposition, you’re ready to proceed.
04. Select your marketing channels and allocate budgets
Where does your audience spend the most time? Is it social media or reading publications and online magazines? Once you know where the people you want to be reaching are, you can best select the types of marketing you wish to implement in your strategies.
Likewise, choose which marketing tools will help you execute the campaigns. Allocating a specific budget for each channel and your KPIs is also important to do in this stage. Using a marketing plan template is a simple and effective way to document your process.
05. Decide on the messaging, creatives and implementation plan
The final step in your marketing strategy is working on your messaging and creative formats. For example, if you plan to educate customers on product capabilities and spend a lot of time on YouTube, you might create a video campaign. The video messaging will resonate with your target audience in a relevant and meaningful way.