Key Steps to Building a Marketing Strategy

Having a marketing strategy is essential to succeed in the fast-paced ever changing marketing world. A marketing strategy is a long-term plan utilized to achieve a company’s goals by understanding customer needs and gaining a competitive advantage through marketing initiatives. This plan will help align your team, tie your marketing efforts to your business objectives, and allow you to identify what resonates with current and future customers.

Here are a few key steps to creating a relevant and successful marketing strategy for your brand.

Set Business Goals

First things first, make sure you have specific overarching business goals set. This way, you can tie your marketing efforts back to your goals and measure your progress.

Identify Your Target Market

A major part of a marketing strategy is identifying your ideal customer. If you hone in on your specific audience, you will be able to pinpoint the challenges and pain points you need to overcome to successfully grow your business.

Research Competitors

Deep dive into your competitors and do a comprehensive exploration on their marketing efforts. Identify what is working for them, what isn’t working for them, and the gaps in their marketing plans. These gaps will be the sweet spot for your marketing initiatives and campaigns.

Select Your Marketing Channels

Selecting how your brand will go to market and the channels in which you will do so can be an overwhelming task. Prioritizing what is most important to you and your brand will allow you to narrow your focus on your efforts.

Develop Marketing Strategy

You now have all the pieces you need to be able to develop a comprehensive marketing strategy. Creating your strategy will lay out a detailed plan for and give you a step by step process on how you will achieve your goals and the timeline you will follow to get there.

Execute Strategy

Your plan is in place, now it is time to execute. Start building your marketing assets based on the decided upon marketing campaigns. It is important to keep in mind your timeline and budget while you are executing in order to stay on track.

Analyze Results

Analytics should be gathered consistently to track and measure the success of your marketing campaigns and initiatives. Setting benchmarks will give you a reference point to go off of and measure your results. Gathering analytics gives you the perfect opportunity to pivot and adjust your marketing initiatives as needed.

Creating a marketing strategy can be a daunting task. In order to grow your business and be successful, strategy needs to be the basis of your entire marketing plan to ensure your marketing efforts are in line with your business objectives. Not sure where to start? Contact the Blank Slate Marketing Group team.