How to create a marketing strategy for your business

Having a marketing strategy in place can be essential for outlining both the short- and long-term vision of your business, as well as encouraging benefits such as a healthier bottom line, better customer relationships, and driving ROI. It’s far more than just a plan for your approach to advertising and sales, and should be a clear and consistent aspect of your overall business plan.

Essentially, a marketing strategy is an overview of how the business will explain and demonstrate its value to both existing and potential customers. This will incorporate features such as outlining business goals, defining your target audience, monitoring competitors, and evaluating the results of any marketing efforts you are undertaking. A dedicated marketing strategy could make your business far more likely to succeed than those without a defined plan in place. As such, taking the time to create a detailed and effective marketing strategy can be both a valuable use of time and resources and a possible way to boost ROI.

Below you can discover more about the 7 key components of creating a marketing strategy, as well as finding out how to implement them as part of your everyday operations.

Define your target audience

One of the main objectives when you build a marketing strategy is to try and connect with the right people. Understanding your target audience can be vital to your success and helps you to identify what it is they want and expect from you as a business. But first, you need to work out exactly who your target audience is.

Your target audience will be the people who are most likely to be interested in your goods and services. This will usually involve them falling into key demographics linked by certain factors including age, location, language, gender, socioeconomic status, lifestyle, interest, and motivation, amongst others. For example, your target audience might be aspirational male car owners or older pet lovers. Understanding your products is a key part of understanding your target market and will help you to assess how these demographic features will come into play.

Even in the digital age, when goods and services are increasingly sold online, understanding the importance of a local presence can’t be underestimated, as people tend to search for things in their local area.

Conduct a competitor analysis

As well as knowing your audience, you need to have an in-depth understanding of your competition. This is a key element of any successful strategic marketing plan. Without knowing the competition, you will have no yardstick against which to measure your business, which makes the success of any marketing strategy very difficult to quantify.

You might think you know your rivals, but it’s always worth taking the time to conduct a more thorough analysis. This will give you a clearer understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, and shine a light on these areas within your own operations.

In order to conduct a competitor analysis, you first need to identify who they are, in terms of assessing direct competitors, secondary or indirect competitors, and substitute competitors. Next you need to gather information about their pricing, products, place, and promotion (see more below as we discuss the marketing mix). You also need to look closely at their positioning in the market, reputational history, staffing policies, and more. This will allow you to analyze their strengths and weaknesses in specific areas and enable comparison with your own. It is often very useful to create a competitive analysis table where you score rivals out of ten in various categories.

It is also very important to remember not to allow concerns about competitors to dictate or dominate your strategy. Ultimately, a good marketing strategy is about you rather than them.

Establish your unique value proposition

Once you have carried out your competitor analysis, it is very useful to try and determine your competitive advantage. This is the thing that makes you stand out and gives you more appeal to customers, also known as your Unique Value Proposition (UVP). This is the intersection of what you do really well, what your competitors do less well, and what your customers really want from you. It is the aspect of your business that clearly communicates with customers how your goods or services will solve their problems.

Understanding your UVP will ideally help you to understand the presentation of your goods and services from the point of view of the people that will pay for them. For example, this could be that your goods are 100% organic or sourced from ethical suppliers. It could be that you offer free home delivery. Or even that your branding is more on point.

You can establish your UVP by thinking about your ideal customer. What are they like? What are they looking for in a product? What benefits would make it easier for them to make a choice? You need to focus on clarity and specificity here, rather than vague generalizations. You will also need to put your ideas to the test with research, optimizing your theories as you go.

Set your marketing goals

Without a clear destination, the journey will always take longer. A key step in your strategy should be to identify and set marketing goals. These will be the objectives you are trying to reach through your marketing growth plan. Obviously, your goals need to be realistic and achievable, but they should also be challenging.

One method of defining marketing goals is to use the acronym SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Defining your goals according to these parameters will help to ensure that they are attainable, eliminating generalizations and guesswork. It also makes them easier to track and measure, all within a specific time frame.

For example, rather than having a goal of increasing sales, using SMART you could set a goal to increase sales of your core products by 15% in order to meet overall revenue goals within a calendar year. This is a marketing goal that has a specific target, can be measured using accurate data, is achievable and relevant to one area of the business, and is time-bound to one year. These are the kinds of specific goals that can really help to drive success when creating a marketing strategy.

Develop your marketing mix

Within marketing strategy there is a concept known as the ‘marketing mix’. It revolves around the four Ps, as alluded to above. These are product, price, place, and promotion. These four special ingredients can’t just be bought off the shelf as some kind of business elixir; they need to be carefully considered in the right quantities in order to achieve the best balance for your business.

The 4 Ps of marketing represent the four key pillars of the art, as you can see below.

Product

This is the fundamental good or service that your business provides. Whether it’s an established product or a new launch, you need to make sure that it is meeting the demands of customers – or creating new demand. You need to be familiar with the lifecycle of your product, from its introduction to market, to its rate of growth, and eventual possible decline. At each stage in this journey you can then adapt pricing and marketing to match. Ask yourself who your product is for, how they will use it, and what specific features it possesses.

Price

Once you know your product inside out, you can begin to ask what people might pay for it. Sometimes, with new products, it can be hard to know what value it might have. Of course, you need to balance your need to make a profit with the consumer’s need to get good value. First, you should try and position your product in the market. Is it a luxury or budget item? This will affect your brand messaging and help you establish how price-sensitive your audience might be. You should also compare price points of competitors and assess whether you can use different pricing tiers for various customer groups.

Place

The idea of ‘place’ used to refer to a specific geographical location, such as a brick-and-mortar store that directly targets a community or demographic. While that is still relevant, place can now also refer to online locations such as the various social media platforms you use to advertise or sell your products. An understanding of place is closely linked to a knowledge of the people that buy your goods or services. Ideally, you need to be visible to the right kind of people, so establishing where your online presence should be is equally as important as deciding where your physical operation is based. For example, if you’re targeting an older demographic, then TikTok is probably not the place to advertise.

Promotion

The final P pillar is promotion, and it encompasses elements of all three previous Ps. In order to spread the message about your business, you need to have understood your product, price, and place in the market. This will help determine not only where you conduct your marketing but also the language and branding you use, and the timing of campaigns – even considering when your competitors are likely to be promoting.

Create your action plan

Once you are ready to create a marketing strategy, you need a plan of action, putting into practice all the theoretical lessons learned above. Here are some of the steps you will need to take:

• Outline how you are going to reach potential customers, including deciding which marketing media you will use and how you can reach the right demographic. Will you be adopting a comprehensive social media plan or will your marketing be targeted more at a local presence?
• Think about how you will create marketing materials, whether that might involve blog posts, TV and radio ads, social media ads, campaigns involving influencers, or other ideas. You’ll need to establish clear marketing guidelines, such as tone of voice and imagery, and base it all in a marketing workflow.

Monitor and measure your results

Before launching your plan into action, you need to establish what a successful campaign will look like for your business. As part of the SMART methodology outlined above, your business goals need to be measurable. This means establishing metrics for marking your progress, as well as putting in place monitoring systems and recording methods to chart results.

Depending on your specific business goals, there are numerous ways you can measure and analyze success. For example, revenue growth can be monitored through company bookkeeping, although it should account for variables such as business costs and customer demand. If your goal is to claim a greater share of the market from competition, then you can measure your sales against overall product market sales. Some marketing goals, such as brand recognition or reputation, can be more difficult to measure, and you may need to enlist the support of market research analysts.

In all of the above, data is paramount. All marketing decisions should be based on aggregating as much available data as possible. If not, then you are not harnessing the immense power this provides. Data-driven marketing and analytics can be hugely significant and can help to inform and refine marketing decisions for maximum ROI. If the data is showing that a current campaign or strategy is not working, then it might be time for a bit of spring cleaning to help redefine your goals.

Without a marketing strategy, your business is essentially wearing a blindfold. You have no idea where you’re going or what obstacles might be right in front of you. A well-defined marketing strategy enables you to develop business objectives, using the SMART method to make sure these are attainable and measurable. And measurable is the key word, because a strategy is key to helping you analyze and assess the progress of the business and the ROI of your efforts. It can help you to identify your core customers, get to know your product better, and understand your place in the market – both now and in the future.