How to Create An Awesome Marketing Strategy in 7 steps

I was recently talking to a CEO of a startup who had spent 3 years building his unique tech solution. He said to date they had implemented some marketing tactics including creating a simple website, a couple of downloadable datasheets and posted on social media. But he complained that he wanted “Quality leads now – and not in 3 months!”

Of course, there are ways of generating marketing qualified leads quickly, but ideally to achieve sales qualified leads and drive growth, every business should have prepared a detailed marketing strategy prior to launching their solution. As implementing a marketing strategy is important. So important, in fact, that businesses that have a documented marketing strategy are 538% more likely to report success than businesses that don’t have one.

There’s no one right way to create a marketing strategy, but these 7 steps will give you a good starting point.

1. Why do I need a marketing strategy?

Your marketing strategy will give you direction on how you plan to tell the world that they need to do business with you and differentiate you from your competition. So this is when you need to decide - are you looking for brand awareness and consideration or lead generation? Brand awareness has the misconception of being considered expensive, but brand building is affordable and is required to build consumer trust. And quality content builds consumer loyalty and must be created before you can really achieve qualified leads. 

2. Identify with your customers

Understanding your buyers’ needs, challenges, habits and processes can help you to align all the great content you are creating to drive new business. So developing buyer personas is key for you to identify with your potential customers and to gain their trust and keep their interest. Segmentation is also essential for creating targeted campaigns as you can refine all aspects of your messaging to relate directly to these personas and their pain points. 

3. Continuously Create Content

Content has become core to everything in marketing, so you absolutely have to budget for it. If you haven’t already, then you should create a content marketing plan. On average it takes 8 touches of content to even generate a conversation with a prospect. Whether it is shorter content to boost brand awareness like a story on social media, or long form media like an article offering a deeper insight; your content needs to be relevant, engaging and adding value, whatever you think will be suitable for your target audience.

4.    Be Creative

You need to stand out from the crowd and show everyone why your business is amazing in this increasingly competitive marketplace. Uniquely represent your business through all your advertising and marketing campaigns by bringing your brand to life, with personality and compelling narratives. Consumers appreciate originality and emotion and these concepts are often the best place to start. Use authentic imagery wherever possible to reinforce your story and emotional branding is a forward-thinking creative strategy, that has been proven to increase customer retention and loyalty. As when it comes to parting with their money, how a person feels about your brand is ultimately the deciding factor.

5.    Choose tactics to suit your business

A data-driven marketing strategy can help you learn more about your audience to improve your tactics and your future campaigns. More specifically, it can help you improve your customer experience with the use of personalisation or it can even help you create more effective ads to reach the right audience. Assess everything carefully, make sure you’ve got a plan to actually measure whatever you try. Social media is vital for a business on a budget, but which is your best channel - LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram or all three? Online and offline campaigns can both generate meaningful leads but why not integrate them? Whatever tactic you choose, always optimise everything by practising A/B testing, to determine which asset or subject line performs better.

6.    Prioritise Customer Experience

Providing a positive customer experience will likely lead to new business and potentially get you free promotion to all of their network. Give a bad experience and they may never come back. So customer experience must lie at the core of a business to ensure you are consistently delivering a great journey from the initial email, to clicking on a landing page to the follow-up process after an event. But you can’t take your eye off the ball as you need to continually audit this journey and improve it.

7.    How do you measure success?

The SMART goals you set with your marketing strategy will determine which metrics are right for your business. Each metric e.g. form fills, number of downloads, net new customers enables you to monitor what is working within a campaign and where you need to make adjustments, so that leads become customers. However, you define success ensure that whatever you’re measuring can be tied back to your business goals.

A carefully mapped out marketing strategy is the key to the growth of your business and reaching your goals. It should be the first thing you do before you allocate funds or invest time in any marketing activities. It’s your guide to who you target, how you talk about your business, and how you differentiate yourself from all other businesses. I often hear from my clients that they know they should be doing marketing, but they don’t know where to start. My reply is always the same. I recommend starting with a marketing strategy.

Send me a message at www.fortyfourandfour.com and schedule a free call to discuss how we can grow your business together.

#marketingstrategy #contentmarketing #creativity #startups

Photo credits:

People on crossing - photo by Jacek Dylag on Unsplash

Chess tactics - photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

Pencil box - photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash