What is a Marketing Strategy?

Developing a strong marketing strategy is an essential component to helping your business grow. That said, a 2019 report by Smart Insights revealed 45% of companies surveyed did not have a digital marketing strategy.

Unfortunately, many companies find developing a marketing strategy confusing and overwhelming. It's hard to know where to start.

Fortunately, planning an effective strategy doesn't have to be complicated. By understanding what marketing strategies are, you'll soon be able to develop a strategic marketing approach that works for your business.

What is a marketing strategy?

Marketing strategy takes a long-term view of how to direct a company's resources to:

• Increase brand awareness to reach your target customer base
• Use tactics in line with your business's goals to give you an advantage over your competitors
• Help you build authority
• Identify a specific marketing approach to increase sales

Your marketing strategy is the map that shows you where you are and where you want to be. It helps you identify how you'll direct your resources to reach your longer-term goal.

How does a marketing strategy help firms?

Successful marketing strategies help identify and evaluate specific plans or tactics to move your business forward while keeping the long-term view in mind. Strategic marketing approaches remove the guesswork and subjective evaluations from your marketing campaigns, allowing you to measure results objectively.

For example, a good marketing strategy can help you define your goals, set your budget, and determine if the specific tactics used provide a consistent return on investment or if new actions are needed.

How do you implement a good marketing strategy?

There are three core approaches that all companies can use to start their marketing strategy.

1. Determine your goal(s) and marketing budget.

According to CoSchedule's 2019 marketing survey, marketers who set goals and documented their strategy were over 300 percent more likely to report success.

To help you establish your goal and budget, consider:

• Setting one to five key performance indicators to provide you with data to measure your marketing
• Creating a realistic marketing budget that will help you achieve your goals while allowing you a consistent ROI

2. Identify your target customer.

To get the attention of target customers, you need to understand your ideal customer's values, wants, challenges, and more. You can do this by creating a user persona, which helps identify essential details about your ideal customer so you can determine what tactics work best to reach them.

3. Identify which marketing channels your ideal customer uses.

Your user persona will help determine marketing channels in which you can find your target customers. Another strategy is to research your competitors to learn what tactics are helping them.

Grow your business with a comprehensive marketing strategy.

Successful marketing strategies take into account your company's business goals and show what your company needs to accomplish with its marketing efforts. Determining what marketing strategies are for your business takes work. However, it ultimately saves you time and money by providing a plan for monitoring your marketing tactics so that your business succeeds over the long term.

This article was written by Compose.ly writer Shannon Whyte.