8 Steps to Developing an Effective Marketing Strategy

8 Steps to Developing an Effective Marketing Strategy

A good marketing strategy is a direct result of quality planning. Attracting, Converting, Closing, and Delighting customers is no simple job.

Between keyword research, marketing costs, timeline development, and buyer persona research, it is hard to figure out in what way or when to do your marketing. Below you’ll find ways how to develop an effective marketing strategy in 8 simple steps to make things easier:

Define your Goals and Objective

Define your Buyer Identity

Review Existing Strategy and Data

Audit Related Competitors

Perform Keyword Research and Media Cost Analysis

Determine your Campaigns

Define the Timeline

Define Campaign-Specific Strategies & Production

Step 1: Define Your Goals and Objectives

Focus on a specific business objectives you’d like to accomplish throughout the year. Whether it be monetary growth, brand strengthening, or other value-driven goals like lead generation.

Objective

The objective is your desired end result – state that aligns your marketing strategy to your goals. Where do you want your organization to be? What do you want to achieve? When all is said and done.

Goals

Setting clear, relevant goals will keep you on the right path to manage and achieve your objectives. Define success and determine a way to measure it.

Step 2: Define Buyer Identity

Understanding your target market will give you a direction to have the right communication at the right  time with the right channel in order to achieve your business goals

Identifying criteria about your ideal buyer should be a starting point for a B2B business. Make sure that there are  a good fit for what you are offering. A business profile should include things such as:

Business size (revenue, employees, locations…)

Industry

Geographic location

The next thing to develop is a Buyer Identity /Persona – a representation of your ideal customer based on actual data about customer demographics, behaviours, motivations, and goals. This will help point buying patterns within a business profile.

Step 3: Review Existing Strategy and Data

Must understand your current marketing efforts how effective are, to be able to plan a future optimizations that will help you achieve goals and objectives

Step 4: Audit Related Competitors

Evaluate the web presence and marketing efforts of your relevant competitors will helps you recognize areas of improvement and any opportunities that may exist.

What are doing differently than you? What are the similarities?

What separates your business model related to them?

What outcomes are they getting in comparison to you with the strategies they are using?

Step 5: Content, Keyword Research and Media Channels

The key is to give emphasis on the right content keywords and media costs. The most valuable content will help nurture leads through the buyer’s journey. Content gives value to your prospects, and helps educate them about their problems and the solutions that are available to them. 

Step 6: Determine the Campaigns

What is a campaign? We define it as an effort that bring into line all of your marketing channels around a single offering and goal.

It involves defining to which campaigns to focus on, thru the year. To determine this, start by answering for example, some of these questions:

How many offerings do you have, and how do they relate?

Which offerings should you concentrate on the most, and which ones are complimentary?

How many different campaigns can you logistically and financially support?

Other campaigns may focused on different things, such us:

A specific service or product

A promotional offer

A branded message

Demographics (targeting characteristics of a particular age/gender etc.)

Step 7: Define the Timeline

Campaigns should be planned for the full year, together with production, rollout, and optimization periods.

Production:

Production phase is the time that you spend developing the content and other assets that will be published, distributed or leveraged, as part of a planned campaign.

Rollout:

The rollout phase is the period of time that your planned marketing elements of a campaign go live.

Optimization:

The optimization phase is the period of time that you evaluate collected data from the campaign performance per tactic, suggest revisions to improve performance, and implement the changes.

Step 8: Define the Campaign-Specific Strategies, Tactics, and Production

Now that you have strategy planned out, it’s time to minimize the specific strategy details and elements for your first campaign. Apply the production phase of your timeline and have a considerable time frame of data being collected.

Strategy development and implementation it is imperative when developing a plan that keeps your marketing efforts on go and in alignment with your sales activity. If one phase is delayed or unclear, it will affect everything that follows. The best, is to break it out into focused phases, as described above, and stay committed to the plan.