What is marketing strategy?
From landing a man on the moon to nailing your favourite food dish, every great accomplishment starts with a plan. When it comes to promoting your business, generating leads, and engaging with your customers, marketing strategy is the place to start.
Marketing strategy delves into areas such as: how do you reach your target audience? How do you convert website visitors into sales? And… how do you persuade your customers to become advocates of your products and brand? As well as working out what investment is required to gain a new client, you’ll also need to focus on what ROI you can expect from your marketing activities.
At Ketchup, we relish (!) this bit. Getting to know you, your brand, your customers, and working out, with you, where you are aiming for as a business. In our initial strategy discussions, we’ll cover elements like your value proposition, brand messaging, ideal customer profiles, business and marketing objectives, and how - on a high level - you will achieve those objectives. And we promise to bring energy and fun to the table too!
We’ll be looking at which channels suit your business best and what sort of content you’ll need to create, what campaigns to run and, importantly, what your competitors are doing.
The framework of all marketing strategies typically addresses the following:
- The challenge
- How to tackle the challenge
- A set of clear, concise steps designed to overcome the challenge
Reaching your target market with a marketing strategy plan
A marketing strategy plan is based on your overall top-level marketing strategy; the plan will look at individual aspects of marketing, focusing down to the individual tasks required, resulting in a detailed roadmap of exactly what we need to do to achieve your business goals.
The areas we’ll cover include digital marketing strategy, including paid search and SEO, social media marketing, content marketing or marketing plans for a new website or product launch.
One of the most important things about any marketing strategy plan is ensuring that it directly relates to your target audience. This is why continuous market research, or at least keeping in touch with your audience demographics, is crucial for any company. It’s often much easier when you’ve got a team of experts, like us, on your side who can look at industry trends, carry out competitor audits, and get down into the nitty-gritty SEO elements of keyword research and search engine trends.
Depending on what communication channels you choose, your methods of reaching your target market are likely to be different. For example, SEO might not be of much use for encouraging your audience to visit your stand at a convention or trade show, and agonising over fonts and colour schemes isn’t the way to approach a podcast advert. But how do you know what’s right? Well, by partnering with a marketing agency, of course, then these decisions will be made much easier.
How to write a marketing strategy plan
A successful marketing strategy plan covers the seven Ps. Most of these Ps have been around pretty much since we started talking about marketing as part of business strategy over 40 years ago, which has caused some avant-garde marketers to consider them an outdated approach. However, they’ve lasted this long because they work. They keep you on track, and they help you get results.
The seven Ps are:
- Product – what you want your audience to engage with - be it a product or service
- Place – the channels you’ll use to distribute/sell your offerings
- Price – competitor comparisons, perceived value and promotional offers
- Promotion – your communications plan - advertising, marketing and sales
- Physical evidence – making your customers know that you are ‘real’ - validating your brand
- People – your employees - those involved in selling your products/services
- Process – the operational procedures for delivering your products
We’ve written more about the seven Ps here: The marketing mix strategy makes the difference
Working with a digital marketing agency
By working with a digital marketing agency, you can effectively say goodbye to all the stress involved with creating an effective digital marketing strategy. What’s more, you can dial your marketing function up (or down) quickly and easily, allowing you complete flexibility without the cost of in-house staff
Digital marketing agencies, like Ketchup, are well equipped to cover all bases and you can tap into a wide range of digital expertise, with professionals including strategists, SEO and paid search managers, web developers, graphic designers and copywriters.
So, if you’re scratching your head trying to pull together your marketing strategy, get in touch and offload your problem to one of our three fully qualified marketers. Within minutes you’ll be free to do what you do best, run your business. Give us a call on 0115 671 3868.
Alternatively, you can take a free Ketchup audit which will give you some pointers on what you can fix and what’s working well. Sign up for one of our three audits on offer covering SEO, website and social media.