- Jumping into a marketing campaign without a strategy can result in wasted time and resources. On the other hand, a strategy helps align your methods with your goals.
- A typical marketing strategy is a plan that establishes your tactics, promotion channels, and how you position yourself in the market, and helps determine who your business and creative partners should be.
- To start mapping your marketing strategy, determine your customers’ pain points, establish your value propositions, and find the right marketing channels for your message.
In a world where trends and consumer habits are continuously changing, it’s nearly impossible to do marketing at a high level without a well-thought-out plan. Whether you’re trying to get funds for an elaborate space strategy or want to promote your small eCommerce shop, you need the right plan of action for success. A marketing strategy serves as a map towards your goals and helps you reach them by setting clear objectives and milestones.
Unfortunately, most fresh business owners are so eager to start their marketing campaigns that they often forget to take time to come up with a working digital marketing strategy. And, as a result, they’re putting energy on the wrong things and wasting their resources.
Don’t let this be you. Take the marketing strategy template from this article to map out all the details for your ultimate ROI-boosting campaign. We’ll help you keep up with the trends, make sure you won’t miss a thing, and give you a clear path to success.
Sound good? Let’s dive in.
Defining “marketing strategy”
A typical marketing strategy is a plan that establishes your tactics, promotion channels, and how you position yourself in the market. It also informs you about who your business and creative partners should be and should contain all the details about the methods you’ll use to reach your goals and monitor results.
The importance of having a marketing strategy
Taking the time to map out the particular details of your marketing efforts won’t be helpful without an overarching strategy. If you want to maintain your vision, you’ll need to make every little step part of reaching a bigger goal.
Remember, your primary goal is to solve specific pain points for your customers. You can’t be effective with your tactics if you lose track of your audience’s needs. But let’s face it – customer behavior is changing drastically every year. A strategy is a blueprint that helps you go along with the trends while maintaining your top objectives.
3 steps to plot your digital marketing strategy
Your overall brand strategy starts from defining the core values of your business. These principles that your brand follows should align with your customers’ values and follow the trends in your industry. They are at the core of all your marketing decisions and help you stay competitive.
So how do you find the values that define your business? Here’s a formula to follow:
- Identify your customers’ primary pain points.
- Communicate your solutions in value-based language.
- Utilize the right marketing channels for your values and audience.
Let’s take a closer look at each of the above steps.
Step 1: Pinpointing your customers’ pain points
The simple truth is that not identifying your customers’ pain points makes it impossible to market any product. Whether you’re focusing on content marketing strategy or buying ads on social media, you need to position your product as the perfect solution to your customers’ specific problems.
For example, let’s say you’re offering financial services. One of the most common pain points about money for most people is their financial future. Knowing that would enable you to deliver a value proposition that emphasizes convenience and simplicity in your processes. A friendly and calm approach that promises to explain everything one step at a time would relax people who are often confused by financial matters.
Some of the most common categories of customer pain points include:
Cost
People will always be concerned about all sorts of financial issues, so if your product helps save them some money, you shouldn’t keep it a secret. Make it loud and clear what the price difference is with similar products and specify how much the savings add up in time.
Convenience
Another pain point that most people share is convenience. Everybody loves products that make life easier. If this is a distinguishing factor between your solutions and those of your competitors, make sure that message is front and center of your marketing strategy.
Customer support
Finally, many consumers look for customer support that provides information about replacements, maintenance, warranty, etc. You’d be amazed at how much more customers are willing to pay for a product or service that comes with friendly and helpful support staff. Mistakes can happen to any company, but the way you handle them tells a lot about your brand.
How to find the specific pain points of your customers
The fastest way to learn about your customers is to ask your sales staff. They are working to overcome your prospects’ objections every day and know what’s essential to your potential clients. With this information, you can uncover your clients’ motivations for buying from you.
Next, send out some customer surveys asking people to share how they found you. The answers enable you to map out your customer journey with your prospects’ goals and expectations on each step.
Step 2: Using value-based language
Establishing your value proposition
A value proposition is all about demonstrating the value of your solutions to a particular audience. For example, let’s say a SaaS marketing strategy is geared toward selling its lead generation software to businesses where growth gets prioritized over cost reduction. In that case, all marketing efforts need to communicate that the value of this particular software lies in its ability to facilitate business growth.
In other words, the value proposition should communicate how the solution being marketed will deliver value to the customer.
Who is your target audience?
Depending on your target audience, you should use different languages to address them. But how do you know which words and terms your customers are using? It all starts with creating a persona for your ideal customer.
Write down even the littlest details that could describe your perfect customer. What is their gender? How old are they? Give your persona a name, a location, favorite leisure time activities, even favorite movies, etc. Then go even further and try to describe the person’s thought process when they decide whether or not to buy your products.
Once you have created this persona, you can align your marketing strategies to that ideal customer. This gives you a higher chance of reaching specific groups of people and engaging them with relevant language.
Step 3: Finding the right marketing channels
Perhaps the number one marketing channel these days is social media. Most businesses benefit from having an account on many different platforms, from Facebook to Instagram to Twitter.
However, when you have a B2B business, your social media marketing strategy could very well focus solely on solely LinkedIn. Its membership consists primarily of professionally educated people who enjoy reading industry-specific content. It’s a perfect environment for B2B marketing.
If your products are for teenagers, make sure to check out TikTok. This video-sharing platform has become hugely popular among younger people.
You can make an account for your business on your chosen platform or use the influencer marketing strategy to promote your products. In a nutshell, it means paying for people with a large following to produce content that talks about your products favorably. It’s an effective strategy that allows you to leverage people’s trust in the influencers and their opinions.
Email marketing still works!
The ROI of emails is still remarkably high, even in 2021. According to some research, you can expect to get back approximately $30 for every $1 spent with email marketing.
But an email marketing strategy becomes a true ROI-boosting powerhouse if you combine it with your social media ads and blog content. You can send your customers to read valuable posts and contribute their opinions in social media forums. The more they engage with your brand, the more receptive they’ll be to your sales offers.
Rinse and repeat
Use the steps in this article to sell your products to a market that’s eager to buy them. After your first campaign, take some time to analyze the results. Make some adjustments to the strategy, and repeat the process. Soon you’ll have a bullet-proof plan of action that will make your business unstoppable.
Which marketing strategy examples are you planning to implement in your organization? Feel free to share in the comments.
About the Author
Emily Moore is an English & programming teacher with a passion for space and blogging. She believes that current exploration should be focused on preserving our planet’s resources. With satellites circling the orbit, it is easier to get relevant data on any environmental changes. This, in turn, should help people quickly address any challenges.
