Developing a marketing strategy is essential to nurturing your customers and improving revenues. It’s especially crucial when you want to gain the highest ROI possible for 2023. But to have a powerful outcome, it’s necessary to tie into emerging trends and proven methods to make your strategy work.
In this article, we look at the most crucial aspects of developing a complete marketing strategy for 2023. Let’s get started.
What is a Marketing Strategy?
A marketing strategy is a detailed, structured plan of your promotional efforts across different channels and platforms. The marketing strategy typically includes objectives, target audience profiles, content creation, key performance indicators, and other elements.
Your marketing strategy offers benefits to the team, too, including the following:
- Aligning the team to specific goals
- Help tie efforts to business objectives
- Allow you to identify and test what works with your target audience
- Allows you to find and use emerging trends
Marketing is a fast-paced concern that changes in a flash. Staying up with all of these changes can be demanding; however, staying ahead of the ball can help keep your company relevant.
In the following sections, we’ll share the elements needed to create an effective marketing strategy.
Marketing Mix – the 4 Ps of Marketing
The marketing mix (also called the 4 Ps of marketing) is the first document to create in order to understand what you are marketing, where you’ll market it, and how you’re marketing it. Here are the 4 Ps of marketing:
- Product
- Price
- Place
- Promotion
Once you have the information in place, it’s possible to develop the rest of your marketing plan for each promotional channel or platform. The information in this step must be clear in order to determine the direction of your overall marketing strategy.
Marketing Objectives
Marketing objectives can be set to coincide with the 4 Ps; it’s essential to outline the marketing goals before building your strategy. You may be wondering why that is. The answer is that the goals will determine other elements of the plan, including the budget and content creation process.
Each objective needs to be as specific as possible. Try to create marketing goals divided by channel or promotional tactic. Remember, it’s always possible to come back and revise your goals as priorities change (and they will).
Marketing Budget
The next essential in your marketing strategy is the marketing budget. It’s crucial to determine the funds needed to hire the right marketers, use the right software, advertise on the right channels, and create the right content. Without these factors, your marketing strategy will be ineffective.
It’s OK to start small and build on these once you’ve generated ROI.
Competitive Analysis
It’s also important to know your competition when creating a marketing strategy. If not, it’s challenging to reach your target audience, and you won’t have measurable results. You also won’t know whether you’re standing out from the competition.
While you may already know who your competitors are, it’s still a good idea to take the time to identify them. You may find a huge surprise competitor who’s going after your target audience.
Segmentation, Targeting, & Positioning (STP)
STP or segmentation, targeting, and positioning, is the process of providing relevant, personalised messages to the target audience. Keeping your target audience in mind keeps you from creating posts and ads that have no good purpose or aim. The key is to develop content that resonates with the target market.
There are three steps to STP:
- Identify the target audience: may include interviewing current customers, carrying out market research, and creating buyer personas
- Target a segment of the target audience: speaking to a narrower group of highly qualified buyers rather than sending your message out to everyone
- Position your brand relative to other brands: consider what you do better than your competitors. Map this information when creating your marketing strategy.
Content Creation
By this step, you should have your budget, competitive outlook, and STP information. Now you’re ready to begin creating your marketing content. However, the key to success is to be strategic about creating the right content. It’s important to avoid creating random content that doesn’t solve a problem for your customers. And you need to use emerging trends to ensure your brand has high visibility on the market.
Here, it’s more important to invest in trends that have a high ROI, such as short-form videos, influencer marketing, and social media DMs. Don’t forget to invest in blogging, as this remains an effective marketing technique. This process focuses on where to assign a budget for the most valuable resources, especially if you’re on a strict budget.
Metrics & Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
The last essential piece of your marketing strategy is the metrics and key performance indicators that show how well your strategy is working. The KPIs you choose vary depending on the type of business and the preferred customer acquisition channels:
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- Organic traffic
- Conversion rate
- Marketing qualified leads (MQLs)
What are KPIs?
KPIs are used to measure the performance and progress of a marketing strategy. They’re tied to specific business goals, and they’re useful to stakeholders and cross-department collaboration efforts. They help you set a number of actionable goals.
The Seven Steps of Building an Effective Marketing Strategy
Now, you’re ready to learn about the seven steps of building an effective marketing strategy:
- Build a Marketing Plan
The marketing plan provides you with an overview of the reasons why the marketing team will need specific resources, take certain steps, and set goals throughout the year. Your marketing plan is all the specific actions that you want to take to achieve your marketing goals.
- Create Business Personas
Buyer personas are determined by specific demographic and psychographic information that includes age, job title, income, location, interests, and challenges. Buyer personas don’t have to be created with pen and paper. You can create a template or use software to identify your target audience.
- Identify Your Goals
The marketing strategy you develop needs to include goals that reflect your company goals. These may include having a specific number of attendees at an event, increasing brand awareness, or generating high-quality leads.
No matter what your goals are, they must be specific, and your marketing team needs to consider how to reach these goals throughout the year.
- Choose the Right Tools
Once you’ve identified your goals, it’s essential to have the right tools to measure whether the goals are successful (or not). You’ll find online software, such as social media schedulers, provide the analytics you need to track what your audience likes or not. Google Analytics [SV2] to measure blog and web page performance.
- Review Your Media
Review your current media to see what works with your marketing plan. It can be helpful to divide these assets into three categories: paid, owned, and earned media.
Gather the materials for each media type and put them together in one place. This gives you an overview of what you have and how to use them in your strategy.
If some resources don’t fit into your goals, get rid of them.
- Audit & Plan Media Campaigns
Now you’re ready to determine what additional content is necessary for your marketing strategy. Again, review the media you already own and your marketing goals. Can you use what you have but update the CTAs at the end of each post? Will this help you reach your business goals? Determine what actions are needed and take them.
Next, create a content creation plan. The plan needs to include topic clusters, goals, format, and channels for each piece of content. Be sure to include which challenge it’s solving for your buyer persona.
- Bring It to Life
When you’ve reached this point, all the work done in the previous steps shows you how to execute your strategy and by which teams. The final step is to bring everything together and assign actions to your plans.
Consider creating a document that lays out the steps you need to take to start the campaign—define your strategy. Be sure to think about the long-term or at least 12 months ahead. Use this information as a timeline for your marketing efforts.
Summing It Up
There you have it! These are the steps necessary to create an effective marketing strategy for your business. Creating a complete marketing strategy does take time and effort; however, these will pay off in time with increased customer loyalty, brand awareness, and revenues.
