How to create an effective and winning marketing strategy for your business?

Whether you are a large business or a small business, marketing strategy is essential for every business to reach its marketing goals. It is the overall game plan that provides direction (where to start) and actionable tactics to your team. Marketing strategy helps to turn your business goals into reality and it involves lead generation, customer retention, and sales conversion.

What is marketing strategy?

To develop a successful marketing strategy, it's important to have a clear understanding of what it entails. Essentially, a marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan that considers a variety of factors, including the current market condition, the needs and desires of your target audience, the competitive landscape, and the various channels and platforms that you'll be using to promote your business over the long term. By taking all of these factors into consideration and developing a well-structured plan, you can maximize your chances of achieving your business goals and standing out in a crowded marketplace.

Why do you need a marketing strategy?

There are several reasons why your business needs a marketing strategy.

• A successful marketing strategy has the potential to enhance brand awareness
• With effective marketing techniques, businesses can identify their target audience
• Developing products and services with high profit potential is made easier by utilizing marketing strategies
• It allows you to determine what connects the business with its audience.
• A well-crafted marketing strategy can set your products apart from the competition by offering unique value propositions.
• By utilizing marketing strategy, businesses can understand where to invest for maximum return
• It allows businesses to allocate resources more effectively.
• Effective marketing strategies facilitate cohesive coordination between various business departments, working towards the common goal of achieving success.

Define your marketing or business goals

To develop your complete, winning marketing strategy, first, you have to identify your business goals.

Specific

To make a goal effective, it needs to be specific. Make sure the goal is as clear and includes specific details. Specific goals should answer the questions like, what do I want to accomplish? What is the purpose of this goal? What does the goal relate to? Which audience and competitors are involved? How will the goal be reached? What are the key obstacles in achieving the goal?

Measurable

The second aspect of a SMART goal is that the goal should be measurable. This allows us to understand whether progress is being made toward goal achievement or not. Ask the following questions when determining the measurability of a goal, Can you measure the outcome? Can you track the progress? How will progress toward this goal be tracked? How do I know if I have reached my goal? What metrics or indicators will be used to assess success?

Attainable

At this stage of the process, it's important to take a step back and assess the situation realistically. Your goals must be achievable and not set so high that you end up falling short. Take a moment to ask yourself if your team is capable of reaching the objective you've set.

Relevant

Make sure the goal is relevant to your company’s vision, and mission and that might be anything such as boosting revenue, expanding into new markets, or enhancing the company's reputation. When goals are relevant, they become more accessible to teams. This will help the team to move in the same direction towards the overall success of the business.

Time-bound

SMART goals should always incorporate time-related parameters so that everyone is aware of the timeline and can work towards meeting the deadline. Some teams prefer to view these deadlines visually by using shared calendars to track progress. Having clear goals and set deadlines can help teams prioritize the most important tasks.

Conduct market analysis

After developing a marketing goal, now you have to understand the market in which you are going to operate. To develop an effective marketing strategy, you have to understand the macro-environmental factors that will impact on business’s performance. PESTEL analysis is one such important tool that helps to know the factors that will affect the business shortly.

PESTEL is an acronym that stands for Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legal factors.

Political factors

You have to consider some factors when assessing the attractiveness of a potential market. This can include government policies and laws, political stability or instability, taxation policies, budgets, foreign trade policy, labor law, environmental law, and trade restrictions.

Economical factors

Economical factors include GDP, average national income, exchange rates, inflation rates, interest rates, and unemployment rates. These factors may have a direct or indirect impact on a business, because they may affect the purchasing power of consumers. This could also change the demand/supply models in the economy. As a result, it will significantly impact the price of the business’s product and service.

Social factors

Social factors include population growth rate, age, gender ratio, income distribution, career attitudes, urban-rural divide, health statistics, lifestyle attitudes, cultural barriers, and employment rates. While targeting certain customers you have to consider the above factors.

Technological factors

The technological factor is one of the most important factors of the PESTEL analysis. It includes research funding, the level of innovation, automation, research and development (R&D) activity, technological change, cyber security, internet connectivity, and the amount of technological awareness that a market possesses. These factors will allow businesses to make decisions on whether to enter or not in certain industries, and whether to launch or not certain products.

Environmental factors

It includes new environmental policies, recycling standards, climate change policies, carbon footprint targets, resource scarcity, waste disposal, and sustainability of resources.

Legal Factors

It includes more specific laws such as discrimination laws, employment laws, data protection laws, consumer protection laws, copyright and patent laws, ethical standards for advertisements, and health and safety laws. Businesses have to know what is legal and what is not to avoid legal actions. Each country has its own set of rules and regulations and businesses should consider those laws if it trades globally.

Identify your target audience

Personalization is the key to every business marketing strategy and identifying your target market will help you to meet your business and marketing objectives. STP marketing model is an audience-focused marketing model that helps businesses segment their audience, target the right buyers, and position their products to each customer segment. 
STP is an acronym for segmentation, targeting, and positioning.

Segment your market

There are many different ways to segment your target audience

• Demographics – segment the audience by personal attributes such as age, gender, education, occupation, and economic status.
• Geographic – group customers based on the country, region, state, city, urban, suburban or rural locations.
• Psychographic – these factors are a little harder to quantify. They include personality, interests, values, attitudes, or lifestyle.
• Behavioral – segment customers by how people use the product, how loyal they are, what the benefits they are looking for, or how they behave on your online platforms

Target your best customers

By targeting the right segment, you will see more interest and conversions from your ideal customers.

To find the right target audience, you have to consider some factors,

• Measurability – what is the size of the segment? The segment needs to be large enough that you can generate significant traffic.  
•  Profitability – Consider which customer segments would potentially bring in higher profits. Determine the lifetime value of customers in each segment and compare. Make sure that the money spent on marketing campaigns will generate a positive return.
• Accessibility - Consider how easy is it for you to reach each segment with your marketing efforts. Consider customer acquisition costs (CACs) for each segment. Higher CAC means lower profitability

Position your product

Identify how to position your product in front of your target audience. There are some ways to position your product,

• Symbolic - This factor leans into the customer’s image, identity, or lifestyle. Luxury brands use symbolic positioning.
• Functional – functional positioning is all about solving problems. Lean into customers’ pain points and position your product to provide them with genuine benefits.
• Experiential – it is the emotional connections that your customers have with your product or service. Focus on what people feel when they use your product.

Know your product or services

BCG matrix helps businesses to improve products, determine when to invest in products, and which products to develop further. It also helps you to decide which services to eliminate and that leads to retaining existing customers and attracting new customers.

Many businesses have a vast selection of products, but not all of them bring in the same level of profit. To aid in the decision-making process, the BCG matrix provides a structure for assessing the performance of each product, enabling the company to determine which products need more investment and which ones should be terminated. It also helps businesses pinpoint potential new products to introduce to the market. 

This matrix is split into four quadrants based on market growth and relative market share.

• Stars - Products with high market growth and a high market share. Investing in products in the star quadrant can be a smart move since they hold a lot of value in their respective markets and show potential for continued growth.
• Question marks - Products with high market growth but a low market share. Question marks are products that may have the potential to become stars, but require careful consideration before investing in them
• Cash cows - Products with low market growth but a high market share. Products in the cash cow quadrant generate profit, but they may not have the same potential for growth as stars. The products in the cash cow quadrant already have a significant amount of investments in them and do not require significant further investments to maintain their position.
• Pets - Products with low market growth and a low market share. Pets, on the other hand, can often be discarded to allocate resources towards more promising products.

Conduct your market and competitive analysis

The next step to developing a solid marketing plan by analyze the current market situation, look into your business’s strengths and weaknesses, and identify what differentiates your products or services from your competitors. You can do this through a simple SWOT analysis to identify your business’s strengths, weaknesses, and external opportunities and threats.

Without SWOT analysis it is very difficult to create a product that provides unique value to your consumers and to evaluate your product’s or service’s market stance against your competitors. So this analysis is crucial for every brand to develop their winning marketing strategy.

You should develop a profile of your competitors, analyze their products and services, discover their STP process, and identify their distribution channels, prices, and marketing tactics.

Related post: SWOT analysis in digital marketing

Identify the marketing approaches

Now it’s time to identify your marketing channels and that is another crucial step in creating an effective marketing strategy. You need to identify the marketing channel which fits your brand and product. How you will reach your target customers is most important to identify your marketing channels. Apart from traditional broadcasts, there are some digital marketing channels you have to consider here.

Social media marketing

In this digital era, social media is unavoidable in every business’s marketing strategy. Social media not only helps businesses to promote products and services but also helps to reach new customers and increase brand awareness. All you have to do is figure out where your customers are spending their time because every type of customer is on a type of platform such X (Twitter), Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, or YouTube. You have to identify which social media channel suits your product and your customers.

Email marketing

Email marketing is the perfect and effective marketing strategy to communicate with your customers in a highly personalized way. It is one of the best tools to increase conversion and generate leads. Businesses can implement email marketing techniques in many ways including newsletters, promotional campaigns, and transactional emails.

Related post: 16 email marketing best practices to improve your campaign

Paid advertising

Digital paid advertising includes social media ads, Google ads, banner ads, native ads, and much more. All paid ads require strategic planning to attract new customers and retain current customers.

Execute the marketing strategy

Marketing execution is how your marketing plan transforms into reality. Bring your marketing plans together and take action. Present your marketing strategy visually, so that the entire team can understand each step. Divide the whole process into stages and present your team using a marketing strategy template. You can also use a roadmap and infographic to visualize your marketing strategy. Make sure that your marketing strategy should be detailed and it should explain each step clearly.

Now it’s time to execute the selected marketing strategy and allocate the budget for each of the marketing channels that you’ve chosen for your brand. 

Analyze the performance

Analytics plays a crucial role in your marketing efforts because it guides your marketing strategies in the right direction. If you want to find out which marketing strategies work best for your business, you can use A/B tests or split tests. These tests enable you to compare different approaches and determine the most effective marketing strategy. Make sure to test one aspect at a time, to get accurate results. Testing multiple elements simultaneously may make it difficult to determine which strategies are truly effective.

You can evaluate the success of each marketing strategy by monitoring your key metrics. These metrics will give you valuable insights into which strategies are more effective to reach your marketing goals.