How to Create a Marketing Strategy? – Complete Guide with FAQs, Tips, Advice, & More   

Many experienced entrepreneurs will tell you that marketing is one of the most important aspects of any brand. 

You can’t sell your product or service to anybody if nobody knows that it exists. 

That’s where marketing comes in. It can help your brand achieve a wide variety of goals such as conversion, lead generation, brand awareness, and much more. 

What is a Marketing Strategy?

In the simplest sense, you can think of a marketing strategy as the plan or approach that a brand takes in order to reach out to consumers and turn them into customers. 

Marketing strategies can be developed to achieve different goals and objectives for a brand. For example, you could have a strategy to find new customers and another strategy to retain already existing customers. 

With most marketing being done through digital channels, it’s hard to keep up with ever-changing trends. 

For example, in the past couple of years, short-form video content has really come to the forefront of digital media. As a result, the brands that have used such type of content to promote themselves have seen a ton of success. 

On the other hand, brands that stuck to their old marketing strategies started to fall off in customer sales and revenue. 

This is a great showcase of how the marketing landscape is always changing. You always have to be up-to-date on what’s the big new thing at that current moment. Only then will you be able to compose successful marketing strategies for your brand.

What Are Some Benefits of Marketing Efforts and Strategies?

Many business owners and entrepreneurs don’t realize the level of benefits that effective marketing goals and strategies can bring to them. 

There are too many business owners out there that spend all of their time, effort, and resources to perfect their product or service. While that’s definitely worthwhile, it’s not the only thing you need in order to have a successful business. 

Effective marketing is something that is necessary. It’s not optional. Hence, you have to take the time to define a budget for it, plan it, and implement it. 

Some great benefits of marketing tactics include: 

You Can Find and Reach Your Target Audience 

With digital marketing, it has become easier than ever to make your brand discoverable and deliver your message to the type of people that would be interested. 

As you’ll find out later in this post, one of the first things you must address when you develop a marketing strategy is to identify your target customers. 

Your target audience can be defined by a number of different factors such as: 

• Age
• Gender 
• Hobbies and interests
• Profession 
• Geographical location
• Associated networks 
• Online behavior 

After you have defined your target market, you have to bring the message of your brand to them. This would increase the chances of them buying something from your brand. 

That’s where marketing comes in. Digital and traditional marketing methods such as tv advertising both play a pivotal role to make your brand more discoverable. 

Digital marketing especially has made it extremely easy for you to reach your target audience with tactics like targeted ads, email marketing campaigns, and social media marketing. Just make sure to identify the appropriate marketing channels.

Not only that but you can also perform segmentation which refers to dividing your target audience up into different groups. Then, you can make personalized and specific messages for each group. 

The more personalized your message is, the higher the chances that a person from that group will respond positively to your marketing strategy. 

Digital Marketing is Quite Cost-Effective 

The great thing about digital marketing especially is the fact that it’s extremely cost-efficient. You don’t have to spend a ton of money to get your marketing strategy off the ground. 

The ROI (Return on Investment) for digital marketing is extremely great. In most cases, the only thing you’ll spend money on is a tool or software that helps you develop your digital marketing campaign. 

Once the strategy is implemented, you can just sit back and reap the benefits. 

In other cases, if you compose a digital marketing campaign and it doesn’t yield the results that you expected, you can easily and quickly shut it down. That way, you won’t invest more money into a campaign that does not yield the appropriate returns. 

It Can Help You Develop Better Strategies in the Future

The great thing about most marketing tactics, especially digital approaches, is that they’re very easy to measure and analyze. Most marketing tools and software that you find online will have built-in systems to measure the response you got from your marketing campaigns. 

You’ll have access to statistics such as 

• Views 
• Clicks 
• Shares
• Likes
• Follows
• Purchases 

And much more. 

As a result, after you’re done with a marketing campaign, you can go back and analyze what techniques and tactics worked and what didn’t. From these results, you can find out how to craft better marketing campaigns in the future. 

In future campaigns, you can invest more time, money, and resources in tactics that yield better results. You can also choose to invest little to no resources on tactics that didn’t yield the results you wanted. 

What’s the Difference Between a Marketing Strategy and a Marketing Plan? 

Many people use these two terms interchangeably but the fact of the matter is that they’re two fairly different things. They have aspects that affect each other but ultimately, they need to be handled differently if you want a successful business. 

Marketing Strategy 

You can think of a marketing strategy as the overall strategy that you will employ for the benefit of your brand. It’s something that will align heavily with your brand’s vision and mission and what you want to achieve with it. 

It exemplifies what your marketing goals are and it also informs how you can achieve those goals with the appropriate brand messaging.

It should be fairly obvious at this stage that your marketing strategy is highly dependent on your brand’s mission, goals, and identity. 

Your marketing strategy will typically include

• An executive summary of your company’s goals 
• Your brand’s vision and mission
• A market analysis of your target audience 
• Competitor analysis 
• Company branding and your corporate identity 
• Information about the marketing channels your company will utilize

Marketing Plan

A marketing plan is more specific and tends to deal with a single marketing campaign that you would run for your business. You’d have to create a marketing plan for every campaign you conduct. 

As you can probably imagine, marketing plans are much more specific, actionable, and detail-oriented. On the other hand, a marketing strategy is more overarching and deals with the overall marketing goals of your brand. 

A marketing plan can be considered to be a plan of actionable steps that you will take to achieve one or more of the objectives laid out in your marketing strategy. 

It would also involve details on how you intend to measure the success of the marketing campaign that you plan for. 

A marketing plan will often include 

• The objectives and goals of the campaign that the plan is for 
• A content strategy (what type of content and the topics for the content) 
• A content schedule (how often your content will be published, on which days, and at what time) 
• Distribution channels (the platforms you will use to distribute your promotional content)
• Tools and software that you will use to develop and monitor the campaign 
• A budget for the marketing campaign 
• An analysis of the results of the campaign once it’s done 

How to Create a Marketing Strategy? (Step-by-Step Guide) 

To develop an effective marketing strategy for your brand, it’s a good idea to take a step back and analyze before you take any actionable steps.

Analyze your brand both internally as well as externally. 

• What type of brand are you? 
• Do you sell products or services or a combination of both? 
• What type of people would be interested in what you have to offer? 
• Do you have different products that would appeal to people of different demographics? 
• Which online channels would your target audience use most? 

These are all questions you can ask yourself when you want to determine what type of marketing strategy you want to develop. It’s important to note that the questions provided above are merely some examples. 

The more questions you ask yourself about your brand, the more fleshed out your marketing strategy will be. 

The exact specific steps you take to develop a marketing strategy for your brand can vary. However, we will provide a generic approach below that you can use as a foundation to develop your own strategy. 

The steps you can take to develop a marketing strategy for your brand are 

Step 1: Identify Your Goals and Objectives

It’s important to have marketing strategy goals and objectives because otherwise, you will have no way to measure whether your campaigns are successful or not. 

How would you know if you’re succeeding if you don’t know what you want to achieve? 

Hence, the first step is to always define the goals and objectives of your marketing strategy. 

Some examples of marketing strategy goals that you could have include: 

• Increasing brand awareness
• Increasing customer conversions and sales
• Tapping into a previously untapped customer segment or demographic

It’s a good idea to be as specific as possible when you define your goals so that you can effectively measure the outcome(s). 

At this stage, it can also be a good idea to define your brand’s vision and mission. This is essentially the goal of your brand and what you want to achieve with it; The essential part that states why your brand exists. 

While this is something that’s not exactly measurable, it can still be highly important for your brand as it helps communicate to your customers what you’re all about. 

You can then base your marketing efforts on your mission statement. 

Step 2: Perform Market Analysis 

Before you start to formulate a marketing strategy, it’s a good idea to do some market analysis to see where your brand lies. 

Identify what type of brand you are and what techniques work best for that type. 

The best way to do this is to study competitors and check out the marketing techniques and tactics that they use. Oftentimes, what works for a similar brand can work for you. 

Alternatively, you can also assess what a certain competitor is lacking or what they’re doing wrong. You can improve on their tactics and techniques to try and grab a bigger chunk of the market. 

Observe emerging trends and fads as well as your own resources to analyze what could work for your brand.

Step 3: Identify Your Audience

When it comes to marketing of any kind, your existing and potential customers should be at the heart of it. After all, they are what you want to target with your marketing efforts. It only makes sense that they would be the main focus. 

The main aim of your marketing strategy should be to identify the needs of your target audience. From there, you can figure out how to meet those needs in a superior way compared to your competitors. 

To identify the needs of your target audience, however, you first need to identify who that is. 

To identify what type of person would be interested in your brand, you have to look inwards and figure out who has a need for the product or service that you offer. 

It can be a good idea to come up with customer personas or buyer personas when you are at this stage. 

A buyer persona is a fictional character that represents the characteristics of a typical person that would be interested in your brand. It typically includes a wide variety of information that could define a group such as 

• Age 
• Gender
• Geographic location 
• Job
• Income
• Interests 
• Challenges 

And much more. 

The more detailed your buyer personas are, the more clear your business goals will be and the more accurately you can develop your marketing strategy. 

Step 4: Take an Inventory of Your Resources 

It doesn’t matter whether you have an established business or if you are currently in the preparation/development stage; you need to be aware of your resources. It’s critical to know what you have at your disposal so that you can create a marketing strategy accordingly.

The goal of this step is to understand where you lie among your competitors in your specific industry or market. 

One technique you can utilize to understand where you lie is to use the 4 Ps of the marketing mix. 

These are 

1. Product: For this, you will analyze your product and what unmet needs it meets for your customers. You must also take into account what makes it better than the products offered by your competitors.  
2. Price: This is fairly self-explanatory. You must analyze the market and decide what price you want to sell your product(s) for. It’s a good idea to take the competitor analysis you performed in step 2 into account here. 
3. Promotion: This refers to how and where you will promote your product. It’s a good idea to take your findings in step 3 into account here. It will provide you with an understanding of which channels your target audience frequents. 
4. Place: Lastly, you must take into account where and how your product will be sold to customers. Do you have an online store or a brick-and-mortar or both? How will you distribute your product? How will customers order? 

Step 5: Refine Your Objectives 

While you did already define your objectives in step 1, those mainly deal with your overall marketing strategy. 

In this step, we want to delve into how your marketing strategy will affect the different marketing campaigns and plans that you will compose. 

To define objectives for marketing campaigns that stem from your marketing strategy, you’ll have to make them a lot more specific and measurable. 

To define goals in this manner, you can use the SMART method. This is as follows: 

• Specific: Clearly define what you want to achieve.
• Measurable: Set tangible and measurable goals so you can assess how successful you are.
• Achievable: Don’t set unrealistic objectives. Set objectives that you can reasonably achieve given your resources and budget.
• Relevant: Your objectives and goals should help you scale up your business and reach higher goals in the future. 
• Time-bound: Make sure to set up a schedule within which you want to achieve the objectives that you define. 

An example of a SMART goal can be to achieve 5,000 within your email list by the end of the next fiscal year. 

As you define clear measurable objectives, you will have the basis for different marketing campaigns that you can run for your brand in the future. This will help your online SEO as well so people can find you through an organic search.

Please note that a single marketing campaign should not be responsible for achieving all the goals that you define here. Instead, these goals should be the basis of several different marketing campaigns that you can compose in the future. 

Pace yourself for the competitive landscape that most niches have. 

Step 6: Create a Marketing Plan and Define Marketing Tactics

Now, this is where you would get into the meat of it. 

A marketing plan is something that you would make for a specific marketing campaign for your brand. The goal of that campaign can be anything from increasing brand awareness to reaching out to a new customer segment. 

Whatever the goal may be, you have to define appropriate techniques, distribution channels, and resources that you will utilize. 

Step 7: Measure and Analyze Performance

The techniques used to measure and analyze the performance of your marketing campaigns may differ based on the type of campaign you run. 

However, it’s a good idea to define some baseline techniques and analytics that you can regularly use to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. 

This is something you can do when you first come up with your marketing strategy. Then, every time you run a marketing campaign, you can use those techniques to analyze how well that campaign performed.

Wrapping Things Up… 

That’s how you create an effective marketing strategy. 

It’s something that can play a huge role in the success of your business. Hence, make sure that you give market research the time and effort it deserves.

If you have any more questions, please reach out to us in the comments section below. 

Interested in finding more about marketing, check out our blog here.