Building a marketing strategy that works

Every successful marketing campaign needs a well-defined marketing strategy. Regardless of whether you are a solopreneur or a giant enterprise, having a marketing strategy is absolutely necessary.

Here are some key reasons why having a marketing strategy is important:

1. Clear Direction: A marketing strategy provides a clear direction and purpose for all marketing efforts. It outlines the goals and objectives, target audience, and the tactics to be used to achieve those goals. It helps businesses focus their resources and efforts on the most effective marketing activities.
2. Targeted Marketing: A marketing strategy helps identify and understand the target market. By analysing customer demographics, preferences, and behaviours, you can tailor your marketing messages and campaigns to effectively reach and engage your target audience. This leads to higher customer satisfaction and increased sales.
3. Competitive Advantage: A well-defined marketing strategy helps you stand out from your competitors. It enables you to highlight your unique selling propositions and communicate the value proposition to the customers. By understanding the market and the competition, you can make your products or services the best choice for consumers.
4. Resource Optimisation: A marketing strategy allows you to allocate the resources effectively. By identifying the most effective marketing channels and strategies, you can optimise your budget and efforts. This prevents wastage of resources on ineffective marketing activities and ensures maximum return on investment.
5. Brand Building: A marketing strategy can play a crucial role in building and strengthening your brand. It helps create consistent brand messaging across various marketing channels and touchpoints. By establishing a strong brand identity, you can build trust, loyalty, and credibility among customers, leading to long-term success.
6. Adaptability and Flexibility: A marketing strategy enables businesses to adapt to changing market conditions and consumer preferences. By continuously monitoring and analysing market trends and customer feedback, businesses can make necessary adjustments to their marketing tactics and strategies. This helps them stay relevant and responsive to the evolving needs of their target market.

Now that the importance of having a marketing strategy is clear, let’s dive in deep to understand more about it and what all you should consider before making one.

Things to know before building a marketing strategy

There are several things to keep in mind while building a marketing strategy, and most of them are just the basics. This includes understanding your audience, goals and budget, which will help you build a marketing strategy that is well planned and can be easily executed.

Let’s go through them one by one.

ICP/Target audience

Understanding your ideal customer profile (ICP) is one of the first and most important steps. It’s practically impossible to build a marketing strategy without understanding your target audience well.

If you are confused about determining your ICP, then simply ask yourself what problem you are solving and who you think will absolutely need it.

Goals

Having clear goals is also important to building a marketing strategy that works. This is important because the goals are what will determine the course of your marketing strategy. Sometimes your goal might be to just build popularity instead of having sales or conversions, which will mean that your marketing strategies should be focused on branding

This clarity will help you define which marketing strategies to prioritise and also how to implement them.

Budget

The next important point to consider when building a marketing strategy is your marketing budget. Having a higher budget would mean that you would be able to invest in ads and hire contractors/freelancers for things like content writing. On the other hand, having a lower budget would restrict you to using organic channels and doing most things by yourself.

Marketing strategies to keep in mind

There are hundreds of marketing tactics that one should keep in mind while building a strategy. Let’s go through the popular and see when you should consider them.

Digital ads

Advertisement is a common marketing strategy that many businesses use to reach their business goals faster. The most popular and common way of doing this is by using platforms like Google Ads or Meta (Facebook) ads and using their platform to run ads across their network. You can also directly contact website owners in your niche and pay them to run your ads on their website.

One major benefit of running ads is that you can start seeing results immediately, but they only last until the ads are running.

When to use ads:

• Have budget to run ads for a meaningful time
• Ability to effectively run and optimise ads for better reach and conversion

Content marketing

Content marketing is a marketing strategy that involves creating and sharing valuable and relevant content to attract and engage a target audience. The goal of content marketing is to build brand awareness, establish credibility, and ultimately drive conversions.

By delivering valuable content, businesses can build long-term relationships with their audience and position themselves as industry leaders. Examples of content marketing include blog posts, videos, infographics, social media posts, podcasts, and white papers.

When to use content marketing:

• Have patience and time as content marketing takes time
• Either budget to hire writers or expertise and time to write on your own

Email marketing

Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that involves sending targeted messages and promotional materials to a group of individuals via email.

It is a direct and cost-effective way that you can use for your business to communicate with customers, prospects, or subscribers. Email marketing allows you to stay connected with your audience, nurture relationships, and drive engagement and conversions. It includes promotional emails, newsletters and emails related to product updates.

If you are looking for an easy-to-use email marketing tool, then do check out EmailOctopus – we are free for upto 2,500 subscribers.

When to use email marketing:

• When you have an email list in the form of subscribers or past customers
• Want to build a long-term relationship
• Stay in touch with your subscribers/customers/prospects

Social media marketing

Social media marketing (SMM) includes using social platforms like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and others to promote your business. It is also a great way of building brand awareness, engaging with the target audience, and drive website traffic, leads, and sales. One of the major benefits of social media marketing is its cost-effectiveness if done in-house.

Remember to choose the right social media platform for your audience. For example, Instagram and TikTok are good choices when the target audience consists of young people, while Twitter and LinkedIn are good when the target audience are working professionals.

When to use social media marketing:

• When your target audience uses social media
• You want to reach a wider audience

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing can be considered as a branch of social media marketing, but it has a very different approach. It involves partnering with influential individuals, known as influencers, to promote a product, service, or brand.

It’s a great way of building credibility and tapping the influencer’s audience. Do keep in mind that influencer marketing can be expensive depending upon your niche, but you can also look out for barter deals (giving product for free) or collaborate with micro influencers who charge less.

When to use influencer marketing:

• Your product/service is B2C
• Have the budget to invest in influencer marketing or the ability to give product/services for free to the influencers

Conclusion

Regardless of what your product or service is, having a marketing strategy is important. Also, before building a marketing strategy, focus on understanding your target audience, budget and goals. Once you have that, plan out your strategy for which you can consider things like, social media, influencer marketing and email marketing.

Feel free to checkout EmailOctopus for all your email marketing needs, and it’s free for upto 2,500 subscribers.