Planning and Strategy
Foster brand loyalty and affinity with the right marketing process and strategy.
Table of Contents
Background
Audiences today are consumed by connected technologies. Often they are bombarded with marketing messages. Your brand’s mission to stand above the noise is getting tougher. You need to think wisely about building and retaining your audience. You need a robust marketing strategy that will shape your story.
Marketing Strategy and Planning
The main goal of marketing is to add customer value and deliver more revenue. But how will you achieve that goal if your marketing direction is ailing?
Clear and structured marketing directions are what propels an organization forward and reach greater heights. Without a clear marketing strategy, your marketing activities will lose their purpose and become worthless disjointed activities.
A marketing strategy is a proactive and data-driven approach in ensuring that every marketing and communications are aligned across your business channels and touchpoints.
Developing a Strategic Marketing Plan
You need confidence in your marketing strategy. A company may have more than one strategy in place at any given time, using various marketing platforms and channels. To stay on course, here is what your marketing strategy should look like:
Start With Situation Analysis
Before anything coming up with a plan or metrics you need to track, you must determine the current health of your marketing activities. Perhaps your company is meeting revenue goals but is looking into expanding your reach. You must take an assessment of how your current marketing activities are contributing to the success of meeting your revenue goals.
Define the Ideal Customer
Relying on a broad description of your client is going to hurt you. Studies show that some consumers buy differently than other consumers – meaning you segmented customers is highly preferred as they have different buying habits. Take the time to define your ideal customer, and segment them by age, status, and or even position in the company. Once you describe the perfect consumer, define how your services and products solve their woes, establish their perceived values, what drives their decision-making process, and the end goal they’re trying to achieve.
Establish SMART Marketing Goals
Marketing brings in highly qualified leads that turn into sales. You must identify your short and long-term objectives and how they add value to your business goals. You must detail how your marketing efforts improve revenues. Goals must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. Be specific so you can measure your success using marketing automation tools. Set a timeline to track progress so you can make adjustments as you work towards the ultimate goal. For example, your goal is to increase sales. Then your SMART goal can be increasing sales by 10 percent with the help of more lead conversion at the end of the quarter.
Select Marketing Tools
Once you know your customer and what you want to achieve, set methods on how you may achieve them. Establishing a frequency—lead scoring—for every “touch” is a great way to keep everyone on the team on track. A touch is considered any point of contact with a prospect. It can be an email, social post, website visit, and so forth.
How an Effective Marketing Strategy Operates
Marketing entails collective effort. It also requires deep insights with a pragmatic approach. You must explore what’s possible for your brand, obsess over customer pain points, and actively monitor touchpoints. Having a strategy is critical, but so is knowing when to evolve and adjust it. You’ll know when your marketing strategy is effective if you are able to:
Uncover the cold, hard facts using data
Data is the blood that keeps your marketing strategy pumping. By pulling data from any available source you learn about your audience, identify challenges, and start to formulate ideas. Data is essential, but the real challenge is in identifying imaginative ways to build, engage, and convert your key audiences.
Dig deeper into your market
Attracting a target audience requires you to understand their challenges. Through extensive audience research and competitors research, you identify what problems audiences face and what makes them tick for your competitors.
Find opportunities
Data is essential, but the real challenge comes when finding opportunities to generate deeper insights. Your strategy must be distilled into underpinning solutions and a roadmap.
Market in the right channel
Whether it’s paid or organic content, an effective strategy must assess where your marketing will have its greatest impact and identify ways to connect your audience to your brand.
Make improvements by measure performance
Strategies are not one-and-done. In the world of Digital Marketing, it is iterative. You must aim to revisit marketing strategies regularly so you can take into account new data, assess trends, and adjust the course accordingly.