Marketing Strategy to fast track success

Marketing strategy is a long-term, forward-looking approach to planning all marketing activity to achieve a competitive advantage.

Whether you’re looking to increase sales, grow engagement or launch a new product or service, it’s imperative that a business plans and documents the end goal, which campaigns are best to run and how these will impact each other.

So how can a watertight marketing strategy help you achieve your objectives?

With a clear understanding of your aims, a well thought out approach and a plan that maps out how you will achieve success, Serenity Digital can help make the most of your marketing efforts.

Failing to plan, planning to fail

One of the biggest challenges facing businesses is having the correct strategy in place for all their marketing activities, to avoid weakening their sales efforts and wasting money.

What we’re seeing

We often see prospects who haven’t invested in a marketing strategy experiencing the following challenges:

Reactive marketing

Marketers who do not plan effectively are constantly going to be on the back foot. Reacting to opportunities rather than having planned ahead of time makes for a stressful approach, often rushed and posibly lacking in quality.

Poor sales materials

As there is no plan in place, it becomes more likely that sales collateral is being produced without real intention or the correct message to suit the audience/platform. This can very quickly lead to a lack of engagement and wasted marketing spend.

Disparate marketing channels

With the digital marketing landscape as it is, companies are often using many channels, including their website, email, social media and search engine advertising. If this is not structured, the channels could have a detrimental impact on each other.

Not tracking results

If digital marketing activities are not being pre-planned, it is also likely that they are not being tracked to monitor the effectiveness of them. By not tracking, you won’t know which activities are doing well and which aren’t, meaning you’ll be ill-informed to adapt and make improvements where needed.

Blowing budget or not spending at all

Some marketers who do not have a strategy plan to guide them through the year can make bad decisions and end up investing in something in a moment of panic to generate more sales. Without an agreed budget and direction, it’s easy to overspend, or indeed not spend anything at all as the risk feels too great.

Missed opportunities

Using the wrong channels for your audience type can be extremely costly. If you are delivering the right message in the wrong places, this can lead to many missed opportunities and the return on investment can suffer.

Comprehensive strategy

When used in combination with a well-developed website, robust integration, and water tight guidelines and policies, a marketing strategy will deliver a successful return on investment.

Our 6 tips below will help your marketing strategy yield results:

Allocate time and resource to plan

This initial stage will determine the success of your marketing strategy. Many marketers are put off writing a comprehensive plan as they lack time. However, if you miss this fundamental step, managing workload, communicating with your team and fulfilling your marketing objectives can feel virtually impossible.

Decide who is responsible for what and when

As part of any good plan, it’s essential you are clear on the work that is required, when it needs to be completed and who is responsible for each individual task. This will ensure structure and that deadlines are met to keep everything on track for success.

Consider all channels

First look at all channels of marketing you are doing already and the results you are seeing. Consider any channels you feel would be a good route to market, namely platforms your target audience engage with. Think about their demographic, location and how your messaging may need to be adapted.

Work backwards from your budget

If you have a budget, consider which channels you can afford to invest in and how much you’ll allocate to each. It is also important to review progress and success during campaigns, as there may be scope to move the budget around to accommodate channels that are generating better results.

Consider your competition

What are they doing? How are they doing it? How can you do it better? These are some of the questions to ask when looking at how others in your industry are marketing to your prospective customers. Invest some time in carrying out some competitor research or appoint someone else to do this for you.

Measure and review

As you start to run different campaigns across multiple channels, you can use data to further improve your marketing. Ensure tracking is in place where you can and ask your audience for feedback at every appropriate opportunity. How did they find you? Why did they choose you? etc etc.

To round up...

Marketing strategy is a logical investment for every business, however, as we have explored, companies face real challenges when trying to develop an effective strategy and put a plan in place to make it happen.

To learn more about how we can help choose the right marketing methods for the best results, please get in touch.

« All blogs