What is marketing strategy?

Your brand strategy is about defining the core values of your brand to make sure that they align with what your prospect and existing customer find important, that they align to your industry trends and competitive environment, and to what you actually offer ie your product.

That’s not an easy task, but without it, all the other marketing tasks become much more difficult.

One of the top reasons why products or services fail is when their makers fail to identify the customers’ pain points. In other words, they don’t meet the customer’s need or they don’t solve a vital problem in their lives. Also, those needs may change over time so it’s important to continue examining the customer journey and solve your current customer challenges.

That brings us to our next topic – creating a competitive analysis. This is a crucial step in the marketing strategy plan creation because this is where you will identify what differentiates your product or service from the competition. You can do this through a simple SWOT analysis to determine your brand’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Without this step it’s going to be very difficult to create a product that provides unique value to the consumer and stays competitive with the market trends of the day.

Now that you have your story right, it’s time to build the right strategy for your marketing. That means making business decisions about what are you delivering and to whom.

Your product or service tells the most about your brand.

This is the actual hands-on experience prospects and customers have with your brand, and it can affect their perception about it the most.

Deciding on your target audience could change the way you present your brand and even the language you use to do it.

We love to use simple models for complex decisions.

We found it is much more effective and fun.

Identifying your potential partners or collaborations is a critical step of reaching your ideal customer. It may be that there are online communities that already exist where your customers hang out. It could be that you need to work with a distributor or get a marketing partner to help you reach them.

This is a critical point to consider before you execute your inbound marketing strategy. Sometimes finding and working with the right partner could give you access and help you achieve 10X the results. This could be through revenue sharing or an affiliate program. It could also be done by social networking at industry events or online conferences.

Make sure that the service provider you hired is aligned with your brand and the various marketing strategies that you want to employ, so they can apply your strategy to the actual marketing communication you’ll have with your potential customers.

Now that you have defined your value proposition, your partners, and your creative assets and messaging it’s time to select the right marketing channels for your marketing mix. This is one of the most crucial steps of the process of creating your marketing strategy. Each digital marketing campaign will vary greatly based on the marketing channels that you’ll pick.

What are your goals? Pick a few strategic business goals or KPIs to focus on in the short-term. A really helpful rubric for this is what’s called SMART goals. Smart stands for: 

Specific – describe clearly what you want to accomplish

Measurable – set goals that you could measure

Achievable – these goals have to be achievable and not way out of reach

Relevant – set goals that improve the specific aspects of your marketing, so no vanity metrics.

Time-bound – pick objectives that you can achieve within a certain time frame. 

Now that you’ve set up your goals it’s time to look at your market.