Let’s begin with what a marketing plan isn’t: hiring someone to manage your social networks and upload TikToks. Also, it is not about running banner ads that no one clicks on or wants.
Marketing strategies are the blueprint for how a company grows by reaching, converting, and retaining new customers.
A clear marketing strategy identifies measurable goals and validates the market problem your brand solves. It also communicates the customer outcomes that your company provides.
A marketing strategy:
Defines how your business will grow by finding, conversion and retaining new customers. Aligns your team with the business goals that marketing can solve (more revenues). Communicates the value that your company offers to the market
What is a marketing strategy exactly?
When I was in college, marketing was the art of persuading people to buy your products. If you Google “What is Marketing?” the first four search results will define it as “persuades”, “promotes” and “convinces people to do something”.
They are mistaken! They are wrong! It makes buyers buy. It simplifies their journey.
If you prefer a more academic definition,
Marketing strategy is the process of growing your business by engaging, converting and retaining new customers. It involves understanding their problems and then helping them find a solution using marketing content, activities and campaigns.
A marketing strategy is like any other well-defined strategy.
How you will measure success, and what it costs (budget), and the business outcomes that you will achieve.
A digital marketing strategy should include search marketing, content marketing, and offline marketing activities like events.
You should include earned, owned, and paid media. Paid media include paid search ads (PPC), and digital display (banner advertisements), while owned media includes content marketing and social media marketing. Earned media includes PR, link building, and other media.
Many small businesses and SaaS companies are looking to gain new customers and grow their business. These companies can achieve their goals by focusing on organic growth, content marketing and testing conversion “pathways”, without having to hire big-name CMOs or Madison Avenue advertising agency staff.
Marketing Strategy and the Four Ps
My college professors taught us all about the “4 Ps” of marketing: product (what you sell), price ($how much), place (where you sell it), promotion (discounts or other offers).
First, marketing is primarily about one P: Promotion. Advertising. Persuasion.
Second, this strategy may have been effective before the advent of the internet. It was a good way to shop for consumer goods and make purchases. This doesn’t hold true for B2B Marketing Strategy.
Here’s proof: The top YouTube video about marketing strategy is all in getting better Instagram and Facebook ads. Ugh!! !
We have several more Ps of Marketing today. These are the 14 Ps of modern marketing:
What is your company’s purpose? What problem does it solve. People: Who are you targeting? Product: What are you selling. This is the easiest. Price: What is your selling price? Are you a premium or value brand?Personality: are you dry and boring or snarky?Process: Mapping content to the buyer journey has become a marketing mandate.Platforms: what tools and tech make up your martech stack?Place: Increasingly this is more of a digital marketing conversation.Promotion: Banner ads have issues but there are other ways of promoting your company.Performance: how will you measure the performance of your marketing?Proof: How can you show the business that what you’re doing is winning customers?Pictures: Marketing is becoming increasingly more visual.POV: Setting yourself apart with a thought leadership strategy is important too.
(Image Source: Aha.io)
Are there any other Marketing Ps you would like to suggest?
What marketing strategy is needed?
A marketing strategy’s goal is to help your company grow by reaching, converting, and retaining new customers. If growth is important for your company, you will need one.
It’s hard to imagine a company without one. The biggest problem is usually time, money, and resources.
One of the greatest problems I see in smaller companies is when the CEO or leadership team misunderstands the difference between advertising and sales. Because they have had a poor track record of seeing marketing results, they might undervalue it.
This is more than a shame. This is a huge mistake. Every company should have a marketing strategy, and the resources and budget to support it.
A marketing strategy is a way for your company to direct its marketing resources where there will be the highest ROI. According to a recent study, companies who document their marketing strategy are four times more likely to succeed in their marketing programs.
It is also useful to document your marketing strategy. This helps align your team around the different elements of your strategy. It can also be used to help marketers identify non-marketing employees that can create and share content.
Here’s an interview I did years ago about the challenges of documenting your Marketing Strategy.
Documentation is a key ingredient in a company’s success with its marketing strategy.
Your business goals and the main components of your marketing strategyYour target market and their needsThe customer outcomes that you want to achieveHow to map content and campaign to each stage of a buyer’s journeyHow to measure and optimize your success over time
Your marketing strategy is the blueprint for your marketing activities. It keeps your company’s marketing staff and functions focused on your goal: converting, retaining and reaching profitable customers.
Marketing Strategy vs Marketing plan
Marketing strategy and marketing plans are two different things.
Your marketing strategy is a description of what you want and why. After you’ve approved the strategy, it is time to create a marketing plan.
Marketing plans are the details about who does what, when, how, and for how much. Your marketing plan will outline the content that you will create, landing pages that you will design, events you will attend, and the social media platforms you wish to promote.
Marketing plans also define the timeframe of activities, both in a content calendar format and a project plan format.
Your marketing strategy should not change unless there are significant changes in your target audience, product portfolio or expected results.
Marketing plans should be updated every quarter, year, or month depending on what is working and what activities are being done.
Marketing strategy vs marketing campaigns
Marketing strategy should be a long-term, stable picture of how you intend to grow your business.
Marketing plans are the foundation of marketing campaigns.
Marketing campaigns are almost always time-based activities that test a message to a certain audience or through a particular marketing channel.
(Image source: Instagantt)
Marketing Insider Group supports only “always-on”, marketing activities for our clients and ourselves. You not only get positive results but your revenue and ROI increase over time if you regularly publish high quality content
This visual shows the compounding marketing ROI for about a dozen clients who do always-on content marketing.
What is a marketing strategy?
A successful marketing strategy will create a positive cycle that reaches new customers, engages them with quality content and converts them when they are ready. It also retains them as loyal customers.
(Image source: OnTop Visibility)
These are the steps for a successful marketing strategy
Step 1: Create your Marketing Strategy Business Case
Your business case is the basis of your marketing strategy. It defines the goals that you want to achieve for your company. This usually includes new customers, revenue, or sales.
While brand awareness is nice, it doesn’t pay the bills. Marketing must be able to measure business goals and objectives.
Your marketing strategy business case must also address how to retain customers and how to ensure that the company is spending its money well (ROI).
Your business case is the basis of your marketing strategy. It defines the goals that you want to achieve for your company. This usually includes new customers, revenue, or sales.
While brand awareness is an important thing, it doesn’t pay the bills. Marketing must be able to measure business goals and objectives.
Your marketing strategy business case must also address how to retain customers and how to ensure that the company is spending its money well (ROI).
Step 2: Conduct Audience Research
Many companies create buyer personas that are utterly useless. They create buyer personas that are useless.
They don’t discuss the important things that can be done and are actually useful.
The questions they ask, the keywords they use and the content they consume.
We ask some questions to get clients started. This information is used to create topic clusters that are based on buyer signals, pain points, buyer challenges, and other competitive gaps.
Then, we create an annual content plan which maps these topics to the most important questions buyers have. We then create content to answer those questions. We publish them every week.
We also examine whether these topics resonate with and drive engagement with your target audience.
Step 3: Identify your marketing process and tools
This step will focus on the steps that need to be done in your marketing plan. It will also include who is going to do it and what tools they have.
I suggest looking at 5 steps:
PlanningCreatingPublishingSharingMeasuring / Optimizing
These are the tools that we use in our Marketing Strategie:
SEMRush is our keyword planning and competitive research toolBuzzsumo and AnswerThePublic help us with identifying the content our audiences wantDivvyHQ is our content planning and calendar toolWordPress is our website CMSZemanta is our paid content promotion platformHootsuite is what we use to plan our social sharing of rall 3 employeesMailchimp is what we use to share our content to our email subscribersCalendly is our appointment setting applicationClickFunnels is what we use to build our landing pagesStripe is what we use to process client paymentsGoogle Analytics is what we use to track our traffic, engagement, and conversions
Marketing Insider Group’s MarTech stack. Because we only have a few dozen customers, we don’t need a CRM tool such as Salesforce or Hubspot. Mailchimp allows us to set up automated emails.
If you work for a larger business, you might need more enterprise solutions such as Optimizely for Digital Experience or Website optimizations. Paladin Software can help you manage your influencer marketing.
Step 4: Content and Campaigns
Now is the time to plan what campaigns and content you will run. It is important to create content that addresses the needs and wants of your customers.
Write content to solve that customer’s greatest challenge. This question can be answered using Google auto-fill. What are marketers looking for? Google auto-fill tells us:
Step 5: Choose your media
As I said, we need to consider paid, owned, earned media.
Paid media refers to anything that you do to reach your target audience. This is what most people believe marketing is about (spending money). Too many marketers spend too much money on paid media. This is why many CEOs believe marketing is a waste.
However, if we start with the things that we can earn and then use them to accelerate our momentum, that’s when solid marketing strategies really come into play.
Owned Media refers to your website and social media channels. Owned Media includes your website and social channels.
The best way to optimize your marketing strategy is to integrate paid, owned, or earned channels.
(Image source: Hubspot)
Our clients post their weekly blog posts to their website (owned media) and share them to social media and their email newsletter (earned and paid media), and promote the highest-converting content to google or other promotional channels (paid medium).
This is how we deliver measurable Marketing ROI to our clients’ marketing strategies!
Step Six: Measure, Optimize
Step one was about identifying the business goals and the business case that will guide our marketing strategy.
It’s now time to measure the specific metrics that each goal requires.
Reach new customers with website visitors. Conversion: leads, sales and revenue per customer. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), upsells / cross-sells, retention rate. Marketing Efficiency: Marketing ROI, Customer Acquisition costs (CAC).
(Image source: SmartInsights)
Now you can measure your goals, what you did and how it performed.
This is where many marketers fail. They may count leads or customers. They don’t know which campaigns, content or programs they should continue or discontinue. Move your budget to the things which worked. Don’t do the things that don’t work.
This allows for continuous improvement that leads to higher Marketing ROI.
Marketing Strategy Conclusion
Marketing is more than advertising. Marketing is more than just advertising. It’s a strategy that drives growth for your company.
A marketing strategy that is effective will help you to define your company’s goals.
This article will explain what a marketing plan is and why it is important. It also outlines the steps needed to make a successful marketing strategy.
Contact us today if you need assistance in crafting a simple marketing strategy to grow your business through weekly blog content
The post What is a Marketing Strategy? Marketing Insider Group published the post What Is a Marketing Strategy?
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By: Michael Brenner
Title: What Is a Marketing Strategy?
Sourced From: marketinginsidergroup.com/content-marketing/what-is-a-marketing-strategy/
Published Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2022 10:20:50 +0000
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