How can you get the best out of marketing to grow your business? The trick is to create a marketing strategy that kills the competition and continuously generates leads.
Every business, irrespective of its size and industry, needs digital marketing to survive and grow in this competitive world. The global digital marketing and advertising industry is expected to be worth more than $786 billion in 2026.
The exponential rate at which the industry is growing is evidence of its importance.
A solid digital marketing strategy is your finest weapon for customer engagement, brand building, lead generation and better sales. Let’s look at the six steps you need to follow to create a well-planned and impactful digital marketing strategy.
Take note of these essential steps to create an effective marketing strategy for your business in 2023.
1. Determine Your Goals
The first step in this guide on how to create a marketing strategy is to establish your marketing goals.
Do you want to expand your online presence? Would you like to increase your subscriber base? Do you want to drive more sales?
Clear and specific objectives are the foundation on which you create a marketing strategy. Creating a well-tailored training program for your employees can help focus your energy on meeting these objectives
Let’s say you want to generate more leads and are using a good lead-generation software solution for the same. The marketing tactics, marketing channels, and the KPIs you choose should all be focused on achieving this goal.
2. Identify Your Target Audience
The next step in this guide on how to create a marketing strategy is to identify your target audience. You should consider the products or services you are offering and conduct market research to define your target audience.
Creating ideal buyer personas is a great way to identify the key characteristics of your potential customers and create a marketing strategy that is specifically crafted to impress them.
As you can see in the following example, a buyer persona looks beyond the usual demographics of age, sex, location, etc., and gathers information like interests, goals, purchasing motivation, and much more.
When you create a marketing strategy considering buyer mindsets and preferences, you can develop successful marketing campaigns. And to successfully turn your target audience into customers, you need to build a strong marketing funnel. How would you do that? Gather some actionable tips from this Attrock post.
3. Analyze Your Competition
To create a winning marketing strategy, you need to thoroughly analyze your competitors. As they are operating in the same marketplace as you and targeting the same audiences, it is critical to monitor their marketing tactics and their performance.
Competitor analysis will help you:
- Fine tune your products and services
- Determine a competitive price point
- Target the right locations
- Set the right budget
- Adopt trending promotional tactics
Be it SEO, social media marketing, email marketing or content marketing, you can learn a lot from your competitors’ successes and failures. This exercise can also be helpful in managing business expenses as you can spend on tactics that yield higher ROI.
4. Choose Your Marketing Channels
There are plenty of digital marketing channels available today. But should you invest in them all? Not necessarily.
If you are a SaaS company, the marketing channels you choose will slightly vary from that of an ecommerce business.
Some of the critical criteria you should consider while choosing marketing channels are:
- Your goals and KPIs
- Appropriateness for your industry
- Where your audience is most active
- Where your competitors are active
- Your marketing budget
When you create a marketing strategy, you should not only choose the channels wisely but also select the right tactics for each channel to run successful campaigns.
5. Select Appropriate Tools
It is imperative that when you create a marketing strategy, you select the right marketing tools you will be using to execute your strategy and track its performance.
Today we have advanced tools for every segment of digital marketing, be it SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, CRM, or anything else. That being said, you may not require all these tools in one go.
Let’s say, your goal is to build a brand presence and generate qualified leads and you have chosen to work with influencers to achieve this goal. Investing in a good influencer marketing tool would be a smart choice.
Choosing the tools that can boost your campaign’s performance and help you gain better ROI is always worth the investment.
6. Use UGC in Marekting Strategy
User-generated content (UGC) is a popular marketing strategy that leverages content created by users, such as social media posts, reviews, photos, videos, and blogs, to enhance a brand’s marketing efforts.
One of the key benefits of UGC is its authenticity. Customers trust UGC more than brand-generated content, as it provides an unbiased perspective of a brand. Additionally, UGC can increase engagement and interaction with a brand. Customers are more likely to share UGC on their social media platforms, which can increase brand awareness and reach.
Another benefit of UGC is its cost-effectiveness. It is often free or low-cost for brands to acquire, making it an affordable marketing strategy. UGC also provides personalization opportunities. Brands can tailor their messaging to specific target audiences, which can increase customer loyalty and satisfaction. Furthermore, UGC can help improve a brand’s search engine optimization (SEO) by increasing the amount of user-generated content related to the brand.
To effectively incorporate UGC into a marketing strategy, brands can use branded hashtags to encourage customers to share their experiences, run social media contests that require customers to create and share content, and feature customer reviews and testimonials on their website. It is essential to ensure that all UGC aligns with the brand’s values and messaging.
Monitor Your Performance
At the end of every phase of your strategy, you should track how well your marketing tactics are working and quantify their success. To do that you should assess the performance based on the predetermined KPIs. What you learn can then be applied to fine tune strategies in the future to ensure better ROI.
To create an effective marketing strategy, you need extensive research, analysis and planning. The steps discussed above are a great way to begin your preparation and create a marketing strategy that is effective enough to beat the competition.
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