Marketing is a dynamic and ever-changing field. The most effective digital marketing strategies change based on the consumer and technology trends. Every company needs a good marketing strategy to be successful. This marketing strategy should be well planned with specific milestones and objectives to ensure the company’s success. If you have the right map, you are more likely to achieve the goals you have set for your business.
This means that although we may be keen to start marketing our business as soon as we have decided to start it, we should actually invest time in planning to avoid wasting our limited budget and energy on the wrong things.
If you want to be successful in marketing, you need to have a good digital marketing strategy.
What is marketing strategy?
The goal of marketing strategy is to create a sustainable competitive advantage by understanding the needs and wants of customers. Marketing strategy is a forward-looking approach that takes into account the overall game plan of the organization.
A marketing strategy is a plan that includes everything from how a company will position itself, to what partners it will work with, to its media relations, to its mix of marketing tools, to the channels and tactics it will use.
A marketing strategy is a company’s plan for reaching potential customers and turning them into customers of their products or services. This document also includes the company’s value proposition, key brand messaging, data on target audience and customer demographics, and other high-level elements.
The “broad marketing strategy” refers to the strategy that used to be called “branding” in the more ambiguous days of marketing. This is a brief overview of the main points of the strategy as well as the general goals and techniques that will be employed to achieve them.
What is the importance of marketing strategy?
It’s easy to get caught up in the details and lose sight of the bigger picture when you’re running a business. They get so focused on the small goals that they lose sight of the big picture. They fail to see how their product solves the customer’s pain points. If that happens, the specific tactics that the business employs can become ineffective.
A marketing strategy should not be something you forget about and let collect dust on a high shelf. Finding your company’s goals and objectives is vital in discovering ways to achieve them. The blueprint will help you market your product or service in a more successful way.
Excited?
Let’s jump into it.
Define your brand value and offering
The purpose of your brand strategy is to ensure that your brand’s core values align with those of your prospects and customers, as well as with industry trends and your competitive environment. This way, your brand strategy aligns with what you actually offer.
It’s not easy to do, but if you don’t, all the other marketing tasks become more difficult.
Identify customer pain points and expectations
If you don’t know what your potential customers are struggling with, it’s very unlikely that you’ll be able to provide a solution that meets their needs. They are not meeting the customer’s needs or solving vital problems in their lives. The needs of your customers may change over time, so it is important to keep examining the customer journey and solving your customers’ current challenges.
Identify market trends and competition
We are now going to discuss creating a competitive analysis. It is important to identify what makes your product or service unique when creating a marketing strategy plan, as this will help you to set your product or service apart from the competition. You can improve your brand by doing a SWOT analysis to figure out your brand’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It will be difficult to create a product that provides unique value to the consumer and competes with market trends if this step is not taken.
Create your value proposition
Now that you have determined what your story is, it is time to develop a marketing strategy that will effectively communicate it. This means that you need to make decisions about what you are going to sell and to whom you are going to sell it.
Your product or service is the best way to show people what your brand is all about.
The experience that potential customers have with your brand can have a big impact on their perception of it.
Make sure that what you offer aligns with your values. This way, you can be sure that you are living up to what you say about yourself.
Identify your target audience
Your target audience is the group of people you want to reach with your brand. How you present your brand and what language you use can be different depending on your target audience.
We love to use simple models for complex decisions.
We found it is much more effective and fun.
This model can help you map the different target audience groups you have and prioritize them in your audience analysis.
Identify partners and potential collaborators
It’s important to figure out who your potential partners or collaborators are before you can reach your ideal customer. There may be online communities where your customers already spend their time. You may need to collaborate with a distributor or marketing partner to expand your customer base.
Decide on the messaging and creative of your brand
Businesses, especially startups, often can’t afford to hire someone specifically for digital marketing, so they use the services of freelancers or agencies that offer this type of service.
Now that you have been charged with the task of protecting your brand’s values and message in the content you create and the different strategies you use.
Define your marketing channels
Now that you have all of the mentioned aspects of your marketing campaign figured out, it’s time to start thinking about which channels will work best to deliver your message. Step one of creating your marketing strategy is crucial. The digital marketing campaign you choose will vary depending on the channels you select.
Select a strategy and budget for each channel
Now that you have chosen the marketing channels for your brand, it is time to select a specific strategy and budget for each one.
Analyze your results
This is a very important step in any marketing activity. After you test something, you need to evaluate the results and keep testing. The data you get from testing marketing strategies is the best kind of data to have. Successful marketing managers use data to improve and refine their growth strategies.
Here are some content marketing tactics you can employ.
If you are hoping to be one of the 42 percent of content marketers who have a documented strategy, then you are in luck. Choose your audience and platform before creating content.
But, is knowing this enough?
Actually, it’s not.
This information is a starting point, but it is not the only thing you need. As a content marketer, you need to produce content that is better than what is currently out there.
Before investing time in creating a piece of content, consider how it will fit into your overall content marketing strategy. At any point, you should be able to explain why you chose a particular topic and what results you expect from it.
There are a few ways you can choose the right topics and set goals for them. Let’s start with setting goals for individual content pieces.
Set a goal for each piece of content
When creating a piece of content, it is important to keep the end goal in mind. This will help you to create a successful piece of content. When you know what you want from something, you can better achieve it. It is helpful to list the goals for a piece of content in order to determine if that particular content is right for the current situation.
In order to decide what goals to assign to your blog posts, videos, infographics, and other content, you should refer to your organization’s content marketing goals and see how a given piece of content aligns with those goals.
To assess the value of a topic, compare it to your larger goals.
Here’s how some of the most common content marketing goals map to the overall organizational goals (plus, the metrics you should measure for each):
Organizational goal: Lead generation | Content goal: Form submissions, trial signups
If you want to generate leads, appeal to people who are further along in the buying process. These people are mostly familiar with your brand and are somewhat interested in it.
, templates, and how-to guides There are many different types of content that can be published on a website, such as eBooks, white papers, tools like calculators, case studies, templates, and how-to guides.
, new customer acquisition rate Sample KPIs that could be used include the number of downloads, the percentage of qualified leads, and the new customer acquisition rate.
Organizational goal: Brand awareness | Content goal: Generating referral traffic
Content that is designed to get backlinks is good for meetingcontent goals because it brings in a lot of referral traffic.
There are many different types of content that can be created to help improve a website’s ranking in search engine results pages. Some of these content types include roundup posts, guest posts, a skyscraper content piece, and infographics.
Sample KPIs – Referral traffic, newsletter signups
Organizational goal: Brand awareness | Content goal: Generating organic traffic
In order to rank well, content must be built upon a mix of keywords. Posts on this site mostly target long tail keywords and aim to improve their ranking on search engine results pages.
Possible content types – Long form content, optimized YouTube videos
Sample KPIs – SERP position, organic traffic
Organizational goal: Engagement | Content goal: Getting comments, shares, views
Content designed to engage existing users typically demonstrates how people are using the product to its full potential.
Possible content types – Brand stories, UGC-style vlogs
Some possible key performance indicators for a website are the percentage of returning readers, page views, number of visits each month, time on site, social media shares, comments, and signups.
Match great content with the different stages in the buying cycle
66% of B2B marketers said that developing targeted content for each stage of the buyer’s journey is one of their biggest challenges when it comes to lead nurturing.
To develop content that appeals to people in different buying stages, it is important to have a good understanding of those stages.
Inbound Marketing identifies 3 stages in a typical buying journey:
Buyer’s journey stage #1: Awareness – During the awareness stage, your audience identifies that they have a problem that they need to solve.
For example, someone who is in the awareness stage of needing a small business invoicing solution may realize that they need a system to manage invoices. Or, it might be that they discover your solution and realize that they need a similar solution.
At this stage of the process, users enter search terms, like “best invoicing solutions for small businesses,” into a search engine.
When customers find you online through searches or other channels and are interested in your service, they enter the second stage of their buyer’s journey, which is the evaluation stage.
They’ll browse your competitors to see who has the best offer. While in the evaluation stage, customers are aware of what your solution can do for them but want to compare you against your competitors to see who has the best offer.
Your prospects in the evaluation phase will compare your product with other small business invoice management tools.
Basically, they’ll Google things like “Your solution vs. X”
Finally, buyers who have decided that your product is the best option for them will make the purchase.
The third stage of the buyer’s journey is when the buyer is ready to purchase the product.
The invoicing solution we’re discussing offers a free trial or demo for people in the purchase stage.
If you want to better understand your buyers, find out what their journey is and what their concerns are at different stages.
Creating content that aligns with the different stages of the buyer’s journey will ensure that your content is relevant to them at all key points in their decision-making process.
32% of b2b marketers produce content that is related to the various stages of the buying cycle. This allows them to provide the appropriate content to the buyer at the corresponding stage of the purchase.
Choose topics based on your audience’s needs
The insights won’t be useful unless you choose the right topics to go with them.
So, for the invoicing example from before, you would have taken into account your broader content marketing goals, studied your buyer’s journey, and selected a few types of content to develop.
If you chose to develop a white paper for buyers in the first stage, a case study for the second stage, and a free consultation for the third stage, this would be an example of a linear buyer journey.
What do you need next?
You will need to find the “real” topics to cover. The stages of buying do not give any help with coming up with topics.
If you want to attract buyers in the awareness stage, you’ll need a white paper. But it will not give you any indication about what topic you should write it on.
You need to ask your customers what topics they are interested in. And, here’s where personas come into play. When you create your user personas, you can identify what they need and what their goals are. Your content should always be focused on helping your readers in these two areas.
If you document the process of creating content that is aligned with your buyer personas, you will produce better results.
