10 Steps to Create a Complete Marketing Strategy
Developing a comprehensive marketing strategy is crucial for achieving sustainable growth and success. Marketing strategies provide a long-term vision for the future, allowing you to create more detailed implementation plans that suit your particular needs and budget.
This guide will walk you through the essential steps to create an effective marketing strategy that drives results.
What is a Marketing Strategy and Why is Having One Important?
The age-old saying ‘failure to plan is planning to fail’ rings true when it comes to a business marketing strategy. Without a vision for what you want to achieve in the future, it’s difficult to take the action needed to drive success.
That’s where a marketing strategy comes into play. It aims to provide a vision for your company of what you plan to achieve over the long term.
An organisational marketing strategy can help you to:
Implement actions that will help you achieve your goals, whether it’s to increase customers or sales by 20% over 2 years, or increase engagement on your social media channels by 50% by the end of the year.
Create a unified and agreed-upon vision for what you want to achieve and how you will achieve it throughout your organization and its various departments.
Measure the impacts and results of your strategy to see if the actions you’re taking are working or whether they need to be adjusted and reviewed, to help you achieve your goals.
Once you’ve developed your strategy, you can start creating a more detailed marketing plan that helps you implement it over the shorter term through concrete actions.
10 Steps to Guide the Creation of a Successful Marketing Strategy
Not all marketing strategies are the same. It requires expert skill and experience to create a marketing strategy that will be effective and help you achieve the goals you have in mind. Often, companies contract marketing agencies to develop their marketing strategies to ensure that they incorporate best practices.
Below are ten steps that you can use to help you develop a robust and successful marketing strategy.
1️⃣ Understand Your Target Audience
Before diving into tactics, it's essential to clearly define your target audience. Consider demographics, interests, and behaviours.
For instance, if you're targeting business professionals, you might focus on individuals aged 35–65+ in director and marketing positions who are interested in business growth and sustainability.
Creating a customer profile can help you target your audience correctly and ensure that your marketing materials resonate with them.
To do this, consider the value proposition of your product or service to your customers, how much they may be willing to pay for it, and where they are likely to shop or hear about your product or service.
Also consider their age, demographics, location, interests, hobbies, and other factors that could help you create persuasive and relatable marketing content. As you build a customer persona, you will be better placed to create effective marketing plans.
2️⃣ Clearly Define Your Marketing Goals
Consider what you want to achieve by implementing your marketing strategy and define clear goals for it and your business in the future.
For example, your goal may be to grow your customer base, to increase brand awareness, to enhance engagement online, or to drive more traffic to your website.
Your marketing goals should align with your overall business goals and should be specific and measurable.
3️⃣ Do Market Research
For your marketing strategy to be effective, it’s important to conduct market research to understand the content of your marketing. This includes considering your competitors, their value proposition, and how to differentiate your business.
It’s also relevant to research the market size for your products and services and the number of customers you’re likely to attract. Furthermore, consider local and global geopolitical and economic factors that may affect your market over the long term.
4️⃣ Choose Your Marketing Mix Carefully
While it might be tempting to blast your message across every available channel, a truly effective marketing strategy requires a more focused approach. Carefully curating your marketing mix allows you to:
Optimise Resource Allocation: Concentrate your budget, time, and effort on the channels that will deliver the greatest return on investment (ROI).
Reach the Right Audience: Different channels attract different demographics and user behaviors. Choose the platforms where your ideal customers are most active.
Deliver a Consistent Brand Experience: Maintain a cohesive brand message and identity across your chosen channels, reinforcing your value proposition and building brand recognition.
Consider a mix of online and offline marketing channels, including social media, content marketing, SEO, email, print, and direct mail.
Different platforms and marketing channels serve different purposes. Consider these channel-specific approaches:
Instagram:
Share behind-the-scenes content
Provide transparent marketing tips
Showcase success stories
Share weekly industry updates
LinkedIn:
Position yourself as an industry expert
Share market research and insights
Post success stories
Engage through polls and discussions
Website/blog:
Share your latest news and updates
Post articles about how your product works
Provide educational resources about your product/service
Include calls to action to boost support for and engagement with your brand
5️⃣ Create Engaging Content And Establish Content Pillars
Creating engaging, relevant content that appeals to your target audience can help create an emotional connection with your brand, enhance your brand’s reputation, and instill brand loyalty and trust.
It’s important to ensure a consistent brand voice across all your marketing channels, and that you take time to develop a brand message strategy. As part of your marketing strategy, you should define your content strategy, including a social media marketing strategy, around key content pillars that will resonate with your audience, such as:
Educational content: Share valuable insights and expertise
Cultural content: Showcase your brand personality and values
Trust-building content: Demonstrate credibility and authenticity
6️⃣ Embrace Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is a necessity for all brands nowadays, as consumers find and engage with brands online through social media, websites, blogs, podcasts, videos, and other digital content channels.
As part of your digital marketing strategy, pay attention to website and SEO optimisation, social media marketing, and email marketing. These are all powerful tools for connecting and engaging with your target audience.
7️⃣ Measure Marketing Success
Include a section in your strategy that deals with tracking progress toward reaching your goals. By defining key performance indicators (KPIs), you can measure whether the tactics you’re using are effective at helping you reach your goals.
These are some of the key performance indicators (KPIs) you could use:
Impressions and reach
Engagement rates
Website click-throughs
Email sign-ups
8️⃣ Stay Flexible and On-Trend
When it comes to being successful at marketing, you’ll need to stay ahead of market trends and technologies, while maintaining the flexibility to pivot your marketing efforts when and as needed.
The marketing sector is ever-changing, with new marketing channels and platforms being developed and fluctuations in popular marketing channels and technologies. Being agile, nimble, and always aware of marketing trends and best practices can help you be at the forefront of marketing success.
9️⃣ Tailor Your Strategy to Your Industry
Tailor your strategy to relevant industries in your market.
Key sectors might include:
Technology and innovation
Sustainability, renewable energy, and marketing for eco-friendly products
Education and consulting
eCommerce and retail
Nonprofit marketing and the charity sector
🔟 Identify Opportunities to Collaborate and Build Engagement
Collaborating with partners, stakeholders, influencers, and communities can help you achieve your marketing goals.
As part of your marketing strategy, identify opportunities to collaborate with others and build community engagement. This may include attending industry events, participating in industry-related discussions, co-creating content with partners, and working with influencers.
How To Implement Your Marketing Strategy
Once you’ve created your marketing strategy, it’s time to implement it. This requires you to create a marketing plan that is focused on short-term goals and practical actions to achieve them.
Below are some tips on how to implement your marketing strategy effectively:
Decide whether to do all marketing in-house, or whether to hire a digital marketing agency to execute your strategy. If you’re looking for the best marketing agency in Australia for purpose-led brands, you’ve come to the right place: Green Socials!
Set SMART goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This includes creating a realistic timeline of when the activities in your plan will be implemented.
Set a marketing budget and ensure you have the resources, skills, and capacity to implement your strategy.
Assemble a marketing team (whether in-house or a marketing consultancy) and allocate responsibilities with clear roles and responsibilities.
Track key metrics, analyse results, and stay flexible to adjust your strategy if needed.
Marketing Strategy Done and Dusted: Now What?
Congrats! You’ve now created your marketing strategy. Doing so is no small feat – it takes careful planning, consistent execution, and regular evaluation. Following the steps above and maintaining flexibility to adapt to changing market conditions, you can create a robust marketing strategy that drives sustainable business growth.
That sounds great, doesn’t it? But remember that your marketing strategy should be a living document, which means it should be regularly reviewed and updated based on performance metrics and changing business needs. So try to focus on providing value to your audience while aligning with your core business objectives.
We hope this guide helps you create a comprehensive strategy that will help you achieve your business goals and cultivate a thriving and engaged brand for years to come.
