10 steps to create a complete marketing strategy

Whether you're managing a small business or you're member of a larger marketing team, the task of reaching customers can be both exhilarating and daunting. It demands a diverse skill set and deep understanding of your target audience to craft effective marketing strategies that resonate and engage. For example, you may brainstorm and upload engaging material, but without a well-thought, strategic marketing take, your breakthrough and growth may be lagging.

In this article, we distil the key elements of crafting a successful marketing strategy into actionable branding insights based on the:

• What to include in your strategy

• How to implement it properly to reach your desired targets

Implementing these strategies effectively can yield a strong following, foster deeper client-provider engagement, and generate enduring leads.

What is a marketing strategy?

Let’s start by taking a look at what exactly we mean when we use the concept marketing strategy. While it may appear straightforward as a plan for advertising and sales at first glance, it's, in fact, a complex and multifaceted approach.

According to Optimizely, a marketing strategy is defined as,

In essence, it's about strategically positioning your company to attract and resonate with your target audience. This process requires thorough analysis, meticulous preparation, and extensive research to ensure effective execution and long-term success.

Why is a marketing strategy essential for your business?

Your business needs to strategise your marketing approach for several reasons. Neglecting to craft one diminishes the effectiveness of your promotional and sales efforts, which can, in turn, hinder your business growth.

Here's why:

1. Target audience reach: A marketing strategy facilitates connection with the right audience. By understanding their needs and preferences, you can tailor your approach to resonate with them effectively.

2. Strategic spending: With numerous marketing channels available, a strategy helps you allocate your resources wisely. By identifying the most effective platforms, you can optimise your marketing budget for maximum impact.

3. Consistent branding: Consistency is crucial for brand building. A marketing strategy ensures that your messaging and visuals align across all channels, reinforcing your brand identity and fostering trust among consumers.

4. Measurable results: Setting goals within your marketing strategy enables you to measure performance and track outcomes. Whether it's ROI, engagement, or conversion rates, these metrics provide valuable insights for refining your strategies.

5. Guided methodology: A marketing strategy serves as a roadmap for engaging with customers. It outlines buyer personas, pain points, and effective communication methods, guiding every team member in their marketing efforts.

Remember that your content marketing and business objectives should work in tandem to effectively cater to your customer's needs. What's the point in mapping out a strategy if it doesn't fulfil your aims and address the demands of your target audience demands?

Below we outline tips to designing the ultimate master plan, crucial for sustained and impactful growth in the digital landscape.

How to build an efficient marketing strategy

Crafting an effective marketing strategy entails a symbiotic relationship between strategy and planning. The development of a strategy informs the creation of a plan, and vice versa. Both components are integral and interdependent, requiring thorough examination of internal and external factors. Understanding your brand and target audience is crucial for bridging the gap between them.

To achieve this, we've laid out key steps for developing marketing strategies and plans. While specific methodologies may differ across organisations, these steps provide a foundational framework for your own endeavours.

1. Assess your scope: Where are you now?

To cultivate brand loyalty, it's crucial to align your marketing strategy, business goals, and customer's needs effectively. Begin by conducting a thorough evaluation of your business metrics to pinpoint areas of strength and areas needing improvement.

This approach ensures targeted efforts towards areas requiring attention, rather than spreading resources thinly across all aspects. Prioritise initiatives that directly contribute to your primary objectives; for example, if enhancing brand awareness is paramount, focus on strategies that bolster visibility over an excessive emphasis on social media presence.

While the process may appear intricate, harnessing a few data-driven insights can offer invaluable clarity and steer strategic decisions, especially in the realm of start-up business development.

The AARRR framework, whimsically dubbed after pirates, serves as a roadmap to success. This funnel represents Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue, meticulously tracking the journey of each user towards becoming loyal clients, brand ambassadors, and trusted referrals.

Let's break down the pirate metrics with a practical example. Picture your business excelling in acquiring new customers; they smoothly navigate through the process of discovering your offerings, adding items to their carts, and making purchases. However, upon closer examination, you discover that your retention rates are alarmingly low. In other words, while customers make initial purchases, they aren't enticed enough to return.

Identifying this issue is the crucial first step. Armed with this knowledge of how to engage and convert one-time buyers into repeat customers, you can now work towards addressing this challenge. This allows you to brainstorm innovative marketing approaches to tackle the issue and drive sustainable growth.

2. Concretise your mission: Ask the WHY

Congratulations on completing a comprehensive audit of your business's technical landscape! Now, what's next? It's time to articulate the driving force behind your content creation efforts. When crafting your mission statements, consider the language you use carefully. Lera Boroditsky's notion of linguistic relativity states that words, beyond their descriptive status, shape our perception of reality, if not reality itself.

Instead of settling for a generic motivation like "Everyone's on social media these days, so I should be too," delve deeper into your mission. Define what truly inspires you and distil your ambitious plans into actionable content infused with purpose, value, and integrity. Once your mission is clear, refine it further with precise questions (and don't shy away from being brutally honest with yourself).

Consider:

• What will success look like once your goals are achieved?

• Why do you seek to incorporate various marketing tactics into your overall business strategy?

• How will these strategies benefit both you and your audience in the long term?
  

While there are numerous approaches to implementing a marketing strategy, it's crucial to avoid feeling overwhelmed. Focus on identifying one to two overarching goals that align with your business objectives and will guide your content creation process effectively.

Once you have a preliminary idea, outline specific, measurable outcomes that signify professional triumph. Rather than propositions like:

set a particular goal that is quantifiable both in terms of numerical figures and timeframes.

That said, rephrase:

By doing so, you take ownership of your progress, methodically tracking results and actions in a pragmatic and strategic manner. It's important to note that this example is merely illustrative; your goals need not revolve solely around increasing followers.

3. Choose your KPIs

KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, act as vital benchmarks to gauge the effectiveness of your strategies.

Once you've outlined your mission, it's imperative to select the right metrics to monitor progress and influence algorithms. This step is crucial because it allows you to evaluate whether your strategy aligns with your predetermined objectives. For instance, if engagement is your focus, metrics like likes, comments, and shares become pivotal indicators of your audience interaction. Similarly, if lead generation is your aim, tracking conversions becomes paramount.

Once you've identified the KPIs that resonate with your goals, it's essential to explore the tools available for measurement and develop performance reports for comprehensive analysis. This strategic approach ensures a clear understanding of your progress and informs future decision-making processes.

4. Know your customers

When you’re creating content marketing strategies or campaigns to promote your brand, it’s easy to get carried away with creative elements, forgetting the specific needs, desires, and preferences in the process. However, consumers are the lifeline of your business, and getting under their skin is the only way to engage, inspire, and connect in a way that is both meaningful and valuable. But why?

According to Forrester's report, Getting to know your customers, over eight in ten (83%) customers cite good customer service as their most crucial purchase for deciding what to purchase. Another study by Salesforce (5th edition), State of the Connected Customer,

more than two-thirds (73%) of customers expect businesses to understand their unique needs and expectations.

Navigating your audience pool can be complex, especially in the B2C realm. Understanding your audience isn't just important; it's imperative. You need to ensure your message resonates with the right individuals, at the right time, and in the right context to avoid your efforts vanishing into the digital abyss. Crafting a detailed profile of your ideal audience ensures you're investing resources where they'll yield results. Let's delve into key questions to capture your audience:

1. Demographics: Who are they? (age, sex, location, interests).

2. Pain points: What challenges do they face, and what solutions are they seeking?

3. Platforms: Where do they spend their time online?

4. Content consumption: How do they prefer to consume information?

5. Decision-making habits: How do they make purchasing decisions?

6. Incentives: What motivates them to make a purchase?

It's crucial to avoid superficiality. Dive deep into understanding your audience, making sure your insights relate to real-world observations. Once you've laid this foundation, segment your audience based on behaviour and demographics. For instance, consider professional men in their 40s interested in watches. While they share common interests, their purchasing habits may vary widely. Customising your offerings and campaigns accordingly is vital for relevance and effectiveness.

As a search engine, Google identifies these moments as 'I-Want-To' instances, where consumers seek quick solutions. Many of us encounter these moments several times throughout the day, and rather than asking a friend or leafing through an encyclopaedia for the answer, we rely on our electronic devices to provide the information.

Such moments arrive in the variations of:

• I-want-to-buy

• I-want-to-do

• I-want-to-know

• I-want-to-go

• I-want-to-try

Understanding these moments allows you to tailor your content and marketing strategies accordingly. To uncover these 'I-Want-To' questions, you must first intimately understand your customers. This requires robust client profiling techniques to identify their needs, preferences, and attitudes effectively. Such techniques can be translated as personas.

Build buyer personas

To further secure a more personal connection and keep a clear vision on who these audiences are, create buyer personas. Treat those as semi-fictive representations of who are your people based on the research you carried out. Then, tether different content types to them, but be as detailed and calibrated as possible. Through this, you won't devalue or idealise your target market.

At times, we tend to underestimate the know-how of our audience or expect them to understand mind-boggling buzzwords and notions. And finally, it's tempting to think that your audience is in fact you, we sorry to break it to you: it's not. You may relate to them in a we-are-soulmates sort of way, but remember that they may behave very differently to you.

5. Analyse your competition

In the vast world of business, it's not just acceptable but strategic to peek at what your competitors are doing. Dive into their strategies, dissecting their successes and shortcomings. Explore every nook of their digital presence, from landing pages to blogs, social media, and newsletters. Compare their brand voice and operational approach with yours. Are they targeting a different audience, or have they stumbled upon a marketing gem you've overlooked? This isn't about imitation; it's about gleaning insights to refine your own strategy and stay ahead of the curve.

A way to achieve this is by typing out their website URL into Ahrefs or Buzzsumo to inspect what content is delivering for them in terms of links and social shares. SEMrush is another powerful content weapon for analysing competitor material. It allows you to leverage the keywords they’re organically ranking for, and have peeks into the volume of traffic asking that specific question.

A cross-referencing against your own website can be useful in making informed decisions about how you can start to compete with them.

6. Structure your types of content

Now that we have the fundamentals covered, you can begin to visualise content. With everything you've researched, think what distinct messaging you want to broadcast. What values and principles do you bring first? This is your reference point for all things content creation.

Act of speech

Next, comes the language you'll use to resonate with the particular segments of people. What tone and style will work best? Then, you'll find ways to set yourself apart from your competitors. What unique selling points that convey human emotion describe your brand? Nobody expects you to reinvent the wheel or revolutionise your field. All you need is a unique, sustainable perspective.

Networking

To start, pinpoint 1-2 channels that align with your skills. Are you outgoing? Consider video or in-person events like trade shows. Do you excel at writing? Blogging might be your forte. Stay informed about your audience's preferences and engagement habits to tailor your approach effectively.

A word of warning: if you're just making your baby steps in the marketplace, it's luring to go overboard and be active on every single platform. Though, it's a myth that in order to scale your brand, you should be present in all existent social media channels. You can always expand as you move along if you have the capacity to do so.

Posting

What kind of posts are you sharing? Do you back them up with:

• Infographics?

• eBooks?

• Checklists?

• Transcripts?

What genre?

• Educational?

• Informative?

• Entertaining?

• Inspirational?

• Emotional?

• Formal?

Ensure your design accords to your brand's visual identity too. If you're planning on posting inspirational quotes, keep the format consistent throughout. What colours/graphics/icons will you use for certain types of content? When inserting imagery in your content, what mood are you going for?

When crafting your content, apply the U.K.F.A.A system (no, these are not the initials for a war comrades association). They stand for:

1. Usability – readable and graspable content? Typos? Subheadings? In-text backlinks – too many/few?

2. Knowledge level – is it written in a way your personas will get?

3. Findability – Is the piece easy to navigate to?

4. Actionability – What is the reader encouraged to do next? Is there a strong CTA, i.e., call to action?

5. Accuracy – Have you used the most relevant and up-to-date data?

Filling market gaps

What content is missing out there? What are people searching for that they struggle to find? Determine your cornerstone content and set dates to plan and upload your follow-up chunks. You can also curate or repurpose other types of material through automisation, i.e., compressing long-form, complicated texts (e.g. whitepapers) to digestible morsels of information (e.g. captions). Then, turn to your clients and under the auspices of polls and Q&As on social apps, produce user-generated content.

7. Pick keywords and metadata

Research keywords! Uncover a combination of niche and generic keywords to organise your marketing content. These serve as the foundational building blocks for structuring your marketing content in a strategic manner. By establishing a robust baseline of categories, tags, and hashtags, you provide a cohesive organisational structure for your content.

Consider a scenario where you manage a food blog. Your categories might span various aspects of culinary exploration, such as recipes, cooking methods, and culinary traditions from around the world. Within each category, tags and hashtags can be employed to further refine and contextualize your content. For instance, under the "recipes" category, tags could include specific ingredients (e.g., oat milk, avocado) or dietary considerations (e.g., gluten-free, vegan). Similarly, hashtags could be utilized to amplify the visibility of your content across social media platforms, targeting relevant communities and conversations in the food and culinary sphere.

To learn about an efficient SEO keyword research, read Neil Patel's step-by-step guide.

8. Roadmap your strategy with a content calendar

And on to planning your content execution! Choose when you're writing to whom about what. It's easier now that you have audiences' behaviours worked out. Blend content types to keep it engaging, but plan ahead. Single out the particular timescales when your audience might be interested in a particular subject. For instance, you're offering gift vouchers — it might be wise to push some promotional and seasonal content around Easter.

That said, what holidays and occasions are fuelling particular behaviours for your audience? Perhaps, they need a value-guided nudge during this time — be it informative or more sales-y. What subjects are trending in particular months? (This may be counter-intuitive to streamlining original work, but you can always permeate content with your personality).

Remember that it's a storytelling process. If you have a content series in mind, launch it! When is best to put it out in the world, and what time slots are preferable to post it? Choose the frequency and add it on your calendar.

Also, allocate resources. Unless you're a solopreneur who undertakes the workload, think of your team and their roles in the content creation process. Who's creating? Who's conducting the research? Set out your resources from the get-go. You might consider implementing a tactic to store ideas for future use if the period doesn't permit releasing it. If you need tools, check out Asana, Trello, running ideas list in your inbox, or in a notebook.

9. How to distribute work

As mentioned above, your ideas mean nothing when they fall on deaf ears. For this reason, your content needs a strategic approach to circulate it methodically and reach the right people at the appropriate time. When are they spending their time? Is it worth showcasing your work on a Facebook group? Should you carry out PR practices to get media on-board and target influencers to promote your stuff?

Have a system of publishing to ward off pitfalls and ensure a seamless workflow. Outline it, write it, fact-check it, ensure it fits the strategy, publish, distribute, and personalise activities to market it for utmost reach.

Set reminders to post evergreen content after a particular time (e.g., a month or half a year after it was published). Also, take inventory of your content. You never know when past material will come in handy. With a simple, intuitive directory, a quick search with specific keywords can save you hours of back-and-forth hunting as you try to reference other pieces with a vague idea of which ones are actually useful.

10. Document it all

Data proves that marketers who have a documented marketing strategy are far more efficient both in terms of results and how they perceive their work. By having it all written down, you never lose sight of your objectives, which keeps you on the right trajectory instead of straying far afield.

In essence, it serves as a comprehensive guide for teams to refer back to and keep everything in check. Your creative mind may wander further and further until you find yourself in the middle of the online forest without knowing where to go or how to keep yourself anchored. Sometimes, an idea may be ground-breaking, but if it doesn't align with your brand goals or will not serve an audience, you better keep it locked in your mental drawer. Make a case by resorting to your document only if you have a valid argument against publishing it. Or it could help you tweak the original concept to match the strategy better.

Conclusion: Checking back frequently

Have systems in place to track your KPIs regularly. Schedule weekly/monthly get-togethers with your team to discuss what went well and what didn't, and, most crucially, what you've learned from it.

Assess your customer behaviour: introduce A/B test your headlines or photos, check how your sales funnels are doing. Are people bouncing on an area of your website? Fix it. If your clients are not engaging, activate and power them through by asking questions. Have you chosen the right channels? Check KPIs, analyse them to ensure you're not wasting your time and budget.

At the end of each cycle, optimise your actions. If you have a working marketing strategy, see how your processes can be improved.

Bottom line: Be proactive!

With all this data, you can refine your strategy based on who is in your audience and what appeals to them. Humanise your brand, get close to them, familiarise yourself with their preferences and insecurities, and you'll hit those marketing KPIs in no time!