TL;DR
- Marketing strategy establishes your marketing priorities
- A marketing strategy isn’t complete without a detailed action plan
- Your marketing strategy can and should evolve over time
What is marketing strategy? A core component of marketing, or just a lot of added work? Nice to have, or absolutely necessary? A marketing strategy is a living, breathing tool that’s designed to make your organization better and more efficient at marketing.
If marketing strategy feels like an intriguing but somewhat abstract concept, then you may have many questions about this crucial tool for marketing. Keep reading to get the clarity that you need about marketing strategy.
What is a marketing strategy?
A marketing strategy is a comprehensive action plan for your marketing. The key purposes of a marketing strategy include—
- Define your marketing goals
- Identify potential marketing activities
- Establish your marketing scope of work
- Develop a measurement and analysis plan
- Identify your available resources for strategy implementation
Marketing strategists are a lot like urban planners. Just like city planners decide where roads, government buildings, and parks should go, marketing strategists develop customized marketing plans designed to meet the unique needs of an organization and its stakeholders. Marketing strategy that aligns business objectives with audience needs is essential for any marketing initiative to be effective.
A marketing strategy includes several major components—
- Marketing mix: “Marketing mix” is industry lingo for the formats and approaches that you plan to use—like partner co-marketing, virtual events, blogs, video, and social media.
- Content plan: A content plan defines the topics (keywords) that you want to cover—usually because they map well to the buyer journey.
- Channel strategy: Your channel strategy is essentially your content distribution plan. A channel strategy identifies the digital channels—such your organization’s website, LinkedIn, and YouTube—where you’re planning to distribute content.
- Marketing calendar: The marketing calendar creates a schedule that specifies when and where each marketing activation will occur.
- Measurement and analysis plan: A plan for measurement and analysis creates the foundation for you to quantify and understand the effectiveness of your marketing.
A marketing strategy is not a static document, but rather the product of ongoing effort. An impactful marketing strategy is constantly being iterated to ensure that its output remains closely aligned with your organization’s evolving objectives.
How to create a marketing strategy
Are you wondering about what’s required to create your first marketing strategy? Let’s explore the steps.
1. Define your goals
Your first step is to identify what you want to achieve with marketing. What can exceptionally creative marketing, using all the right formats and channels, do for your organization? Who is your target audience and what are their needs? Establishing clear goals is essential to setting the direction for your marketing strategy.
2. Identify your resources for strategy execution
Your next step is to identify the resources available to support the implementation of a marketing strategy. What is your budget? Do you have a team? How much time do you have? Consider your resources and limitations at the start to avoid formulating a marketing strategy that you’re unable to execute successfully.
3. Conduct a content audit
If your organization has any type of content already, then your next step may be to conduct a content audit. Even with only a social media presence and a website, you can benefit from understanding what’s working well and poorly. Completing a content audit requires inventorying your content, gathering and analyzing performance data, and identifying potential improvements.
4. Design a marketing mix
After inventorying your content, your next step is to establish a markeitng mix. Planning a marketing mix that is targeted and comprehensive is another research-intensive activity that requires learning your audience’s habits and preferences. This step is complete once you’ve identified all of the media formats and activation types that you’ll use for your marketing.
5. Develop a content plan
With a clear understanding of your marketing goals, resources, and activation mix, you’re ready to develop a content plan. Creating a relevant and effective content plan is a research-intensive activity that focuses around identifying target keywords and mapping those keywords to the buyer journey. A content plan supports the development of keyword clusters that are typically grouped around thematic pillars.
6. Establish your channel strategy
Your next move is to develop a content distribution plan, otherwise known as a channel strategy. Publishing content on your organization’s website may seem like an obvious choice, but which other channels should you consider? Research to understand where your target customers like to digitally hang out, and prioritize those channels for distributing your digital media.
7. Create a marketing calendar
A marketing calendar puts all the key elements of your marketing strategy into a timeline format. Develop a marketing calendar that specifies, for each marketing asset and activation, exactly when that content will be published or the activity completed.
8. Establish a measurement and analysis plan
The time when you create your marketing strategy is also the ideal time to establish a measurement and analysis plan. What quantitative and qualitative data will you collect? How will you collect it? Who will analyze the data that you receive? The prospect of gathering and interpreting data may feel overwhelming, but using data is crucial to ensure that your marketing is impactful and resource efficient.
9. Include provisions to iterate and optimize your strategy
The development of your marketing strategy is complete! Kind of. Your job as a marketer is to ensure that your marketing priorities continually map to the priorities of your organization and target audience—which may mean adjusting your marketing strategy over time. The marketing analytics data that you gather may reveal, too, that other specific changes are warranted.
Your marketing strategy should be specific, but also flexible and adaptable. Develop your marketing strategy expecting to iterate and optimize it as you gain a greater understanding of how the strategy is performing.
Pros and cons of marketing strategy
Marketers love to pontificate about the many benefits of developing a marketing strategy—but you should also understand the opportunity costs. Keep reading to explore the pros and cons of developing and using a marketing strategy.
Pros of marketing strategy
- May enhance your marketing performance across qualitative and quantitative metrics
- Supports consistency in tone, style, and message across all mediums
- Ensures that marketing resources are used transparently and efficiently
- Encourages data-driven decision making
- May improve your long-term return on marketing investment
Cons of marketing strategy
- Complex with many interconnected elements
- Resource intensive, requiring money, time, software, and human support
- Typically requires specialized knowledge and expertise to implement
- Impact can be difficult to measure
- Constantly evolving as organizational needs, customer preferences, and the marketing landscape continually shift
Beginner mistakes when creating & using marketing strategies
Nobody wants to create a marketing strategy that’s ineffective or guides their organization in the wrong direction. If you’re just getting started with developing and using a marketing strategy, then check out this list of what definitely not to do—
- Lack clear goals for your marketing strategy. You need specific, measurable goals for your marketing strategy. How else will you know that you’re succeeding?
- Not fully understand your target audience. Know your target audience and everything that makes them tick.
- Develop a marketing strategy that you cannot reliably execute. A marketing strategy is only as effective as its execution over time.
- Undervalue the importance of content quality. If your content isn’t outstanding, then you’re probably wasting time.
- Neglect content distribution and promotion. What’s the point of producing great content if nobody sees it? Expert content distribution and promotion are critical but often overlooked.
- Ignore marketing data and analytics. Whether you love numbers or not, you need data to clearly understand and efficiently improve your marketing strategy.
- Produce an unoriginal digital marketing strategy. You can probably obtain a boilerplate marketing strategy using ChatGPT or the internet, but would it serve your organization? You need a marketing strategy that is thoroughly custom.
How to learn more about marketing strategy
Want to continue learning about marketing strategy? Here’s what else you can do—
- Enroll in marketing courses online
- Subscribe to marketing newsletters
- Participate in webinars hosted by marketing strategy experts
- Engage with online forums and communities devoted to marketing
- Dive directly in—by drafting your first marketing strategy
Is a marketing strategy right for your organization?
Developing a marketing strategy is a lot of work—which begs the critical question: Does your organization really need a marketing strategy?
If you’re paying for marketing, then the answer is probably yes. Marketing is expensive and time consuming, using more resources than you can afford to waste. Planned correctly, a comprehensive marketing effort can be immensely impactful to your business.
You wouldn’t climb a mountain without knowledge or a trail map to get to the peak. Don’t choose marketing tactics without a robust marketing strategy to guide you.
