Marketing Strategy
Planning for ExcellenceMarketing strategy provides the direction for all marketing activities undertaken by a business.
Without a marketing strategy, activities lack the cohesion required to deliver effectively against specific business go.
Creating a Marketing Strategy
The first step in creating a marketing strategy is to look at your market. A strategy is your means of communicating effectively with your market to drive interest in to sales, or conversion through an online sales process.
Unless you know your market, through market research and competitor research, you may be trying to market something there is no market for.
The most successful businesses deeply understand their market before they even develop a product, solution or service to sell to that market. With this in mind, it’s extremely likely that a good understanding of your market is already held somewhere within your business.
Try to understand the reasons why a product, service or solution was originally created – what market need was being addressed? What characterised this audience? Which competitive and market conditions were taken into account at the time?
Say the right thing…
Messaging in a Marketing Strategy
Once the initial research is completed, and reference to your brand guidelines is made, we need to create a set of messages to communicate to your market. In addition, this should explain how these messages vary across the range of buyer profiles.
Each audience may require a messaging framework to articulate specific benefits in the most compelling way.
Messaging should reflect stage in the buying cycle, role and the influence of buyer dynamics across the decision-making process. After that, other pertinent groups such as vertical, region or maturity in the market can be used to further refine the messaging detail.
Content is King…
Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is a topic in itself, but the marketing strategy needs to take content generation and distribution into account, across all the different audiences, to be successful.
We create content marketing strategies to target the groups and stages outlined in the messaging strategy, with content designed to engage and escalate interest towards sales readiness.
Marketing Communication Strategy
For the majority of B2B businesses in the technology sector, inbound marketing is the main focus of their marketing strategy; fuelled by compelling content. However, inbound marketing still requires communication to drive awareness of this content.
An effective marketing communication strategy takes into account areas spanning search (SEO), paid advertising, content placement and influencer networking, social channels, website and marketing automation to achieve maximum efficiency across the communication process.
The means to an end…
Strategy that Delivers Performance
For a marketing strategy to be truly successful, it needs to forecast results and include reference to key performance indicators.
Many of the marketing tactics employed to deliver on strategic aims will offer the capacity to forecast. For instance, using industry averages to estimate performance. Metrics are then used to determine performance against forecast thresholds.
Return on investment (ROI) calculations are a crucial metric to determine strategic performance. Therefore, these should be deployed at appropriate milestones across individual campaigns and holistically across all marketing performance.
We design marketing strategies to include reporting and analytical considerations, not just to determine end of campaign ROI, but to refine tactical performance in an ongoing manner.
For each campaign, the specific tactical implementation of the reporting and analytics feedback loop is considered, but the top-level strategy should define the overarching approach to this.
Everything undertaken in the name marketing is therefore accountable for business success.
Marketing Influences Business Strategy
Marketing is central to the successful growth of any business. Consequently, the marketing strategy needs to reflect the broader goals of the business and integrate seamlessly with other parts of the business – including sales, technical support and ultimately any aspect of the business which has touchpoints with the customer.
Strategic aims need to support the broader requirements of brand and customer experience. It should unite marketing communications with the broader scope of brand engagement; elevating brand perception and creating a momentum beyond marketing touchpoints.
We can help you refine an existing marketing strategy or work collaboratively to develop a successful strategy from scratch.
Get In Touch
Glastonbury, Somerset, UK
+44 747 666 2948
marc@glastonbury-marketing.co.uk