How to write a marketing strategy

Although I'm known by many clients for my pure digital/search engine marketing skills, I work on wider marketing strategy and implementation too.

As I'm working with a couple of local businesses on their marketing strategies at the moment I thought it would be useful to write up the rough process I follow.

I say 'rough' as every client is different, with very different needs but as I tell all my clients, a marketing strategy is as simple as covering off:

1. Target Customers - who do you want to buy your product/services?

2. Messaging/Proposition - what do you want those target customers to know about you, and remember about you?

3. Tactics - which marketing channels will we use to target those customers, with those messages?

Simple, right?

It depends! (A marketer's answer to everything)

A lot of thought and diagnosis needs to go into all 3 areas so let's delve into the process a bit more... a good place to start is...

Diagnosis - not just for Doctors but Marketers too!

The Diagnosis bit of a Marketing Strategy

A lot of business owners (and marketers) want to jump straight into the tactical part of marketing e.g. 'should I try TikTok shop?' or 'I've had this offer to try radio advertising...'

But it's essential to do some diagnosis first before making any tactical decisions....

Internally

• What are the business results? (Sales/Revenue/Profit)

• What's the business ambition in terms of growth or profitability?

• What's been tried before, marketing-wise? What's worked, what hasn't worked?

• What does 'the funnel' look like? e.g. are you getting lots of leads but struggling to convert to sale? Is there a particular part of your buying journey where you see the most drop-off?

• If you have more than one product, which products are performing best?

• If your business model encourages repeat business, what's your split of new vs returning customers?

• What does data by customer look like - if you were to segment (group) your customers, which would be your largest segment(s)? Are these the most profitable?

• As well as using quantitative data, I always encourage clients to use qualitative data by carrying out 'customer interviews' with existing customers and potential customers. These don't have to be overly complicated but I always try to cover these areas:

  • Where did they do their research when they were researching your product/service?

  • Why did they buy your product/service? ('Jobs to be done')

  • What were the alternatives they considered?

  • What would they improve? (What are their frustrations?)

Externally

• What's happening in your market eg. PEST: Politically, Economically, Socially and Technological?

• What's the size of the market you're operating in?

• What's your market share within that market? (Google Trends is a handy free resource you can use if you don't have market info)

• Who are your key competitors? But more importantly - what are they doing in terms of pricing, messaging and targeting?

Once you've gathered all of this information, you can start thinking about your target customer(s) for the year ahead, and your proposition.

For example:

• A real-life example, working with a B2B client recently - they were selling 2 products but they had about 20 totally different customer targets - too many to target in one go effectively, so we chose 3 different segments for the year ahead based on their previous performance and future potential

• Keeping it simple, imagine 2 cafes next to each other - one is cheap and cheerful, and it's very popular with older customers due to its look and feel (and price!); if you were opening a cafe next door it might make business sense to focus on a younger demographic and focus on their wider range of products, maybe quality/provenance and good free WIFI! Competing with competitors on price will always be a race to the bottom - both would lose, so it makes business sense to focus on different customers with a different proposition

I've mentioned 'proposition' a few times now, but what is it?

How will you make your message stand out?

defining your value proposition

In one sentence, you should be able to describe how you're offering a solution to your target audience's problem, and why they should choose you over competitors.

It can take a while to get this right but take what you've learnt from your customer, competitors and internal review and write a few versions until you realise you've written 'the one'. Once you've nailed it, this isn't your tagline for all your advertising, it's more like the foundation for all your messaging i.e. all the messaging you do should be able to tie back to this proposition. (Rather than trying to land several different propositions e.g. the cheapest, most innovative etc)

Here's a couple of examples to bring this to life:

Hubspot - Free CRM software that grows with your business

Shopify - Anyone, anywhere can start a business

Here's a longer article about writing your value proposition

At this stage, it's worth reflecting on your overall Branding.

Your branding isn't just your logo. Your branding can roughtly be split into:

• Brand identity - logos, imagery, tone of voice - ensuring distinctiveness and consistency

• Brand experiences - your brand values and identity should be consistent across all touchpoints (whether it be a website or sales team)

choosing your tactics and channels

So now, working through the process you've completed 2 of 3 elements of a marketing strategy - your customers and your proposition. Now to figure out what your tactics should involve.

If you've done a deep enough diagnosis, some of the tactics might be relatively obvious e.g.:

• I wrote a marketing strategy for an organisation that was heavily using Facebook and Instagram advertising, but in customer interviews it was clear that customers carried out their early research on YouTube and platforms like Twitch so we came up with a YouTube content strategy as one of their tactics for the year ahead

• When I worked at Veygo, I could see that despite it being a repeat purchase, the % of sales from email marketing were as low as 5% - one of our tactics was to grow this % which we did through rebuilding the email journey and emailing customers at the right time (with more useful content)

• Perhaps you're getting lots of leads but no sales in which case one of your tactics might be to test a few things in the journey to improve sales conversion

• Perhaps it came out in customer interviews that all your customer are listening to a particular podcast, so you need to try and get on there (interview or advertising) to try and reach more customers like yours

• Perhaps your existing channels are performing amazingly, but you've maxed out on them, it's time to test something new e.g. social media advertising, local radio advertising

If this is your first attempt I'd suggest maybe choosing 3 tactics.

Why?

Well I always recommend clients avoid relying on one channel - there are lots of businesses who have grown by just one social media channel for example, but that business can disappear overnight through algorithm changing or hacking issues.

Choosing 3 tactics across different channels should be manageable and potentially give you some data to compare each other against.

Which brings be nicely to....

Your tactics could include PR and/or newspaper advertising to reach your target audience

Measurement and optimisation

Make sure your tactics have SMART objectives attached to them e.g.

• Grow leads from Google Ads by from 100 per month to 300 per month in the next 6 months

• Improve email response rate (sales/emails sent) from 0.2% to 2% in the next 6 months

• Improve website sales conversion from 3% to 5% by the end of the year

You'll need to figure out what budget you'll need too - and off you go.... but don't just to go live and pray.

Set your Budget and KPIs before you go live whatever they may be e.g. sales by channel, Cost Per Acquisition, lead numbers....

Monitor them regularly (at least monthly) and optimise accordingly - if one of your tactics isn't working, what can you tweak? Or is it better to pause and save the money?

We go again - Repeat!

Once you've written your marketing strategy, whether it's a 50 slide powerpoint or a 2 pager on word, it shouldn't be something that gathers virtual dust.

You should go through this process once a year. So just think, these first tactics that you're trying out, you'll be able to use these learnings to feed into the strategy for year 2.

And we go again, and again, and again - adjusting every year to the needs of your business, and most importantly your customers.

Summary

All marketers have a slightly different way of producing a marketing strategy, and my format will vary depending on the client but ultimately it boils down to 3 elements:

• Your customer

• Your proposition

• Your tactics

But to find your way to these 3 elements, you'll have to do a lot of digging, fact-finding and talking to some customers first.

I hope this was useful. It's not perfect and I've perhaps over-simplified some sections.

I've tried to bring it to life a bit with some examples. If it still seems really daunting or confusing, drop me a line and I can help you. We've all been there, sometimes 'you can't see the wood for the trees' and an external perspective (like mine!) can help get the right questions asked and answered to set you on the right path for success.

Pob lwc, good luck!

PS This blog post was entirely written by me. I asked both ChatGPT and Wix's in-built AI engine if they could write a post about marketing strategy in my tone of voice - but neither version was good enough for you my dears!