The Importance of Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy Steps
A robust marketing strategy will reach your target audience – this includes those who have never heard of your brand all the way to those who have purchased from you before.
Without a defined strategy, you’ll essentially be throwing things to the wall to see what sticks. And it’s costing you cost, time, and resources. There are seven key steps to crafting a successful marketing strategy: Build your marketing plan, create your buyer personas, identify your goals, select the tools, review your existing resources, audit and plan media campaign, and lastly, execute your strategy.
Step 1: Document Your Business Goals and Budget
Before jumping into the tactics and execution, your marketing team should ask the leadership team to define their business goals for the next 1-3 years. Your goals can be externally focused, internally focused, or perhaps a mix of both. While you are setting business goals, be sure to also set a marketing budget for the year. A good rule of thumb for setting a marketing budget is 6-to-12% of gross revenue with higher spending in the early phases as you establish your marketing foundation.
Step 2: Conduct A SWOT Analysis
Ultimately, you want marketing that provides a consistent flow of high-quality leads to help fuel new sales opportunities and drive growth. You want your technical target audiences and customers to be happy to hear from you and not dread it. And you have a limited budget and tight bandwidth.
The way to achieve all of this is to use a smart marketing approach that builds a marketing strategy and execution plan aligned to your business goals and starts with a SWOT of your current marketing program. Document strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in terms of your competitive position, target markets, target audiences, current positioning/messaging, the maturity of your offerings, channel partners, etc.
Step 3: Identify Your Target Personas
You probably know the profile of your most valuable prospects and the sales process your company uses to convert them from leads to opportunities to customers. However, as your company grows, you won’t know each prospect’s unique situation, and one message won’t work for all. You’ll need to customize your marketing approach by creating buyer personas.
Step 4: Develop Your Marketing Goals
Armed with your business strategy, areas of greatest opportunity, and defined persons, you are now ready to create your marketing goals. Goal setting is critical to aligning your marketing organization, narrowing your focus, and setting your overall marketing strategy.
Step 5: Build Your Activity Plan
Now that you’ve created your marketing goals and have a budget, you are ready to develop your activity plan. The most effective way to approach turning your marketing strategy into an execution plan is by using a campaign structure. You can think of campaigns as buckets of activities focused on a common theme or goal.
With limited time and budget, a campaign approach gives you the big picture before you get into the weeds of which new video you will produce, which white paper you will write and promote, etc. Campaigns can run the gamut in scope. They can be anything from a major product launch to building thought leadership in a particular segment to increasing web traffic and leads. Here are two examples of marketing campaigns in 2022 and their stated goals and KPIs:
Campaign—Lead generation and conversion
- Description—Through content and partner co-marketing, attract quality leads that convert to opportunities
- KPI 1—Increase leads by 35 percent to 210 per month
- KPI 2—Increase lead opportunity conversion from 6 to 8 percent
- Campaign—Partner marketing
Description—Develop and implement a channel co-marketing program
- KPI 1—Publish at least one lead-generating piece of co-branded content per quarter
- KPI 2—Generate 100 net new leads through co-marketing activities
Strategy is an evolution, and something that takes a great deal of time to develop. However, mapping out a clear, strategic direction will ensure a cohesive marketing plan that maps to your personas through campaigns and is time bound and budget driven.
Step 6: Review your media.
Decide what you already have in your arsenal that can help you create your strategy. To streamline this process, think of your assets in three categories – paid, owned, and earned media.
Paid media means any channel you spend money on to attract your target audience. This includes offline channels like television, direct mail, and billboard to online channels like social media, search engines, and websites. Owned Media refers to any of the media your marketing team has to create: pictures, videos, podcasts, ebooks, infographics, etc. Earned media is another way to say user-generated content. Shares on social media, tweets about your business, and photos posted on Instagram mentioning your brand are all examples of earned media. Gather your materials in each media type and consolidate them in one location to have a clear vision of what you have and how you can integrate them to maximize your strategy. For example, if you already have a blog that's rolling out weekly content in your niche (owned media), you might consider promoting your blog posts on Twitter (paid media), which customers might then reTweet (earned media). Ultimately, that will help you create a better, more well-rounded marketing strategy. If you have resources that don't fit into your goals, nix them. This is a great time to clean house and identify gaps in your materials.
Step 7: Audit and plan media campaigns.
Cleaning house segues straight into this step. Now, you must decide which content is going to help you. Focus on your owned media and marketing goals. For instance, will updating the CTAs at the end of your blog posts help you increase RSVPs to your event? Next, look at your buyer personas. Let's say you work for a video editing software company. If one of your persona's challenges is adding clean sound effects to their videos but you don't have any content that reflects that, make a 15-second demo video for Instagram to show how great your product is at solving that challenge.
Finally, create a content creation plan. The plan should include topic clusters, goals, format, and channel for each piece of content. Be sure to include which challenge it's solving for your buyer persona.
Step 8: Bring it to fruition.
At this point, your market research and planning should help you visualize how your strategy will be executed – and by which teams. The final step is to bring that all together and assign actions to your plans. Create a document that maps out the steps you need to take to execute your campaign. In other words, define your strategy. Think long-term when creating this document. A standard strategy document is 12 months. This structured timeline should be the home base for your strategic marketing efforts. To paint an example, let's go back to the video software company. Maybe in January, you will launch a software update that improves the exportation process for users. In April, you want to publish an ebook that explains editing terms to your buyer personas, and in September, you plan to launch an integration with other software.
Remember, your digital strategy is unique to your business, so the document should be as well. As long as the strategy includes the pertinent details outlined in previous sections, you'll be set.
Comments
Post a Comment