What is a Marketing Strategy and How Does It Work?

Let's begin with what a marketing plan isn't: hiring someone to manage your social networks and upload TikToks. Also, it is not about running banner ads that no one clicks on or wants.

Marketing strategies are the blueprint for how a company grows by reaching, converting, and retaining new customers.

A clear marketing strategy identifies measurable goals and validates the market problem your brand solves. It also communicates the customer outcomes that your company provides.

A marketing strategy:

• How your company will grow through converting, finding and retaining customers
• Your team should be aligned to the business goals that marketing can solve (more revenues).
• Demonstrate the value that your company offers to the market

What is a marketing strategy exactly?

When I was in college, marketing was the art of persuading people to buy your products. If you Google “What is Marketing?” the first four search results will define it as “persuades”, “promotes,” or “convinces” people.

They are mistaken! They are wrong! It makes buyers buy. It simplifies their journey.

If you prefer a more academic definition,

Marketing strategy is the process of growing your business by engaging, converting and retaining customers. It involves understanding their problems and then helping them find solutions through content, activities and campaigns.

A marketing strategy is like any other well-defined strategy.

• How many business outcomes will you achieve?
• Which marketing activities will you be engaging in, and when and where?
• Why are you doing these marketing activities differently to others?
• How to achieve these results
• Who are you targeting (your ideal customer profile?
• Who is responsible to perform each activity (internal or agency, freelancer, etc.)
• How to measure success and what it costs (budget).

A digital marketing strategy should include search marketing, content marketing, and offline marketing activities like events.

You should include earned, owned, and paid media. Paid media include paid search ads (PPC), and digital display (banner advertisements), while owned media includes content marketing and social media marketing. Earned media includes PR, link building, and other media.

Many small businesses and SaaS companies are looking to gain new customers and grow their business. These companies can achieve their goals by focusing on organic growth, content marketing and testing conversion “pathways”, without having to hire big-name CMOs or Madison Avenue advertising agency staff.

Marketing Strategy and the Four Ps

My college professors taught us all about the “4 Ps” of marketing: product (what you sell), price ($how much), place (where you sell it) and promotion (discounts or other offers).

First, marketing is primarily about one P: Promotion. Advertising. Persuasion.

Second, this strategy may have been effective before the advent of the internet. It was a good way to shop for consumer goods and make purchases. This doesn't hold true for B2B Marketing Strategy.

Here's proof: The top YouTube video about marketing strategy is all in getting better Instagram and Facebook ads. Ugh!! !

We have several more Ps of Marketing today. These are the 14 Ps of modern marketing:

1. Your company's purpose: What is it doing? What problem does it solve
2. People: Who are you targeting?
3. What product are you selling? This is the easiest.
4. How do you rank in relation to the market? What makes you unique or different?
5. What price are you selling your products for? Is your brand a premium or a value brand?
6. Personality: Are you snarky or dry?
7. Process: Marketing mandate has been to map content to buyer journeys.
8. What tools and technology make up your platform martech stack?
9. Place: This is becoming more of a digital marketing conversation.
10. Promotion: While banner ads can be problematic, there are still other methods of promoting your company.
11. How can you measure your marketing's performance?
12. Evidence: How do you prove to your customers that you are winning new customers?
13. Pictures: Marketing is becoming more visual.
14. POV: It is also important to stand out with a thought-leadership strategy.

(Image Source: Aha.io)

Are there any other Marketing Ps you would like to suggest?

What marketing strategy is needed?

A marketing strategy's goal is to help your company grow by reaching, converting, and retaining new customers. If growth is important for your company, you will need one.

It's hard to imagine a company without one. The biggest problem is usually time, money, and resources.

One of the greatest problems I see in smaller companies is when the CEO or leadership team misunderstands the difference between advertising and sales. Because they have had a poor track record of seeing marketing results, they might undervalue it.

This is more than a shame. This is a huge mistake. Every company should have a marketing strategy, and the resources and budget to support it.

A marketing strategy is a way for your company to direct its marketing resources where there will be the highest ROI. According to a recent study, businesses that define their marketing strategy are four times more likely to succeed in their marketing programs.

It is also useful to document your marketing strategy. This helps align your team around the different elements of your strategy. It can also be used to help marketers identify non-marketing employees that can create and share content.

Here's an interview I did years ago about the challenges of documenting your Marketing Strategy.

Documentation is a key ingredient in a company's success with its marketing strategy.

• Your business goals
• Your marketing strategy's main components
• What are their needs?
• You want to be able to deliver the customer outcomes that you desire
• How do you plan to map campaigns and content to each stage in the buying process?
• How to measure and optimize your success over time

Your marketing strategy is the blueprint for your marketing activities. It keeps your company's marketing staff and functions focused on your goal: retaining, converting, and reaching profitable customers.

Marketing Strategy vs Marketing plan

Marketing strategy and marketing plans are two different things.

Your marketing strategy is a description of what you want and why. After you've approved the strategy, it is time to create a marketing plan.

Marketing plans are the details about who does what, when, how, and for how much. Your marketing plan will outline the content that you will create, landing pages that you will design, events you will attend, and the social media platforms you wish to promote.

Marketing plans also define the timeframe of activities, both in a content calendar format and in a project plan format.

Unless you see significant changes in your target audience, product portfolio or expected results, your marketing strategy should be stable.

Marketing plans should be updated every quarter, year, or month depending on what is working and what activities are being done.

Marketing strategy vs marketing campaigns

Marketing strategy should be a long-term, stable picture of how you intend to grow your business.

Marketing plans are the foundation of marketing campaigns.

Marketing campaigns are almost always time-based activities that test a message to a certain audience or through a specific channel.

(Image source: Instagantt)

Marketing Insider Group supports only “always-on”, marketing activities for our clients and ourselves. You not only get positive results but your revenue and ROI increase over time if you regularly publish high quality content

This visual shows the compounding marketing ROI for about a dozen clients who do always-on content marketing.

What is a marketing strategy?

A successful marketing strategy will create a positive cycle that reaches new customers, engages them with quality content and converts them when they are ready. It also retains them as loyal customers.

(Image source: OnTop Visibility)

These are the steps for a successful marketing strategy

Step 1: Define your Marketing Strategy Business Case

Your business case is the basis of your marketing strategy. It defines the goals that you want to achieve for the business. This usually includes new customers, revenue, or sales.

While brand awareness is nice, it doesn't pay the bills. Marketing must be able to measure business goals and objectives.

Your marketing strategy business case must also address how to retain customers and how to ensure that the company is spending its money well (ROI).

Your business case is the basis of your marketing strategy. It defines the goals that you want to achieve for your company. This usually includes new customers, revenue, or sales.

While brand awareness is important, it doesn't make you rich. Marketing must be able to measure business goals and objectives.

Your marketing strategy business case must also address how to retain customers and how to ensure that the company is spending its money well (ROI).

Step 2: Conduct Audience Research

Many companies create buyer personas that are utterly useless. They create buyer personas that are useless.

They don't discuss the important things that can be done and are actually useful.

• The questions they ask are
• The keywords they use
• The content they consume
• These are the channels that they use most.

We ask some questions to get clients started. This information is used to create topic clusters that are based on buyer signals, pain points, and gaps.

Then, we create an annual content plan which maps these topics to the most important questions buyers have. We then create content to answer those questions. We publish them every week.

We also examine whether these topics resonate with and drive engagement with your target audience.

Step 3: Identify your marketing process and tools

This step will focus on the steps that need to be done in your marketing plan. It will also include who is going to do it and what tools they have.

I suggest looking at 5 steps:

1. Plan
2. Create
3. Publishing
4. Sharing
5. Measuring and Optimizing

These are the tools that we use in our Marketing Strategie:

• SEMRush our keyword planning tool and competitive research tool
• Buzzsumo, AnswerThePublic assist us in identifying what our audience wants.
• DivyHQ is the content planning and calendar tool for
• WordPress – Our website CMS
• Zemanta our paid content promotion platform
• Hootsuite allows us to plan social sharing among rall 3 employees.
• Mailchimp allows us to share our content with our subscribers via email
• Calendly allows you to set appointments.
• ClickFunnels are the tools we use to create our landing pages
• Stripe allows us to process client payments
• Google Analytics allows us to track traffic, engagement and conversions.

Marketing Insider Group's MarTech stack. Because we only have a few dozen customers, we don't need a CRM tool such as Salesforce or Hubspot. Mailchimp allows us to set up automated emails.

If you work for a larger business, you might need more enterprise solutions such as Optimizely for Digital Experience or Website optimizations. Paladin Software can help you manage your influencer marketing.

Step 4: Content and Campaigns

Now is the time to plan what campaigns and content you will run. It is important to create content that is focused on the needs and wants of your customers.

Write content to solve that customer's greatest challenge. This question can be answered using Google auto-fill. What are marketers looking for? Google auto-fill tells us:

Step 5: Choose your media

As I said, we need to consider paid, owned, earned media.

Paid media refers to anything that you do to reach your target audience. This is what most people believe marketing is about (spending money). Too many marketers spend too much money on paid media. This is why many CEOs believe marketing is a waste.

However, if we start with the things that we can earn and then use them to accelerate our momentum, that's when solid marketing strategies really come into play.

• Owned Media covers your website and social media channels. A strong brand has a large and engaged audience.
• Earned Media includes email subscribers, social media, and PR.
• Paid Media Includes paid search (PPC), banner advertisements, paid social or, our preference, content promotion.

The best way to optimize your marketing strategy is to integrate paid, owned, or earned channels.

(Image source: Hubspot)

Our clients post their weekly blog posts to their website (owned media), and they then share them to social media and their email newsletter (earned and paid media). Finally, they promote the highest-converting content to google or other promotional channels (paid medium).

This is how we deliver measurable Marketing ROI to our clients' marketing strategies!

Step Six: Measure, Optimize

Step one was about identifying the business goals and the business case that will guide our marketing strategy.

It's now time to measure the specific metrics that each goal requires.

• New Customers: Website Visitors
• Engage New Customers: Email subscribers, bounce rate and organic social shares
• Conversion – Leads, Sales, Revenue per Customer
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Cross-sells and Upsells, Retention rate
• Marketing Efficiency – Marketing ROI, Customer Acquisition costs (CAC).

(Image source: SmartInsights)

Now you can measure your goals, your actions, and the results of those actions.

This is where many marketers fail. They may count leads or customers. They don't know which campaigns, content or programs they should continue or discontinue. Move your budget to the things which worked. Don't do the things that don't work.

This allows for continuous improvement that leads to higher Marketing ROI.

Marketing Strategy Conclusion

Marketing is more than advertising. Marketing is more than just advertising. It's a strategy that drives growth for your company.

A marketing strategy that is effective will help you to define your company's goals.

This article will explain what a marketing plan is and why it is important. It also outlines the steps needed to make a successful marketing plan.

Contact us today if you need assistance in crafting a simple marketing strategy to grow your business through weekly blog content