Marketing strategy development begins with collecting the necessary information. It’s recommended to consistently observe the industry: follow news, read professional articles and take part in seminars to learn new trends in marketing. It’s a required to do at every marketing job you hold. When you are just starting, it is essential to be aware of the buzz and share interesting news with co-workers.
There is a myth that when you just start developing a marketing strategy, there comes a point when you have to decide whether you choose to do only traditional or both traditional and mobile marketing strategies. But, beware: a mobile strategy does not exist. It is just a part of a strategy and should not be stripped from the rest of the components. Consumers do not distinguish the marketing messages they get from different devices. The borders are getting blurry and invisible. The proof is the statistics which indicates that 77% of all activities performed through “mobile” gadgets is done from home or office where PC’s are on hand. There is a bad habit of some marketers who do not see things as they are and take strategy for tactics (for example: responsive vs. adaptive debate does not concern strategy at all, but a tactic).
To develop the strategy, you have to clearly understand the basic elements of marketing. They are SEO, SMM and copywriting. These elements reflect the main areas through which you can influence the consumers.
The next stage is to gather internal information that concerns the company itself and the products or services it sells or plans to sell.
- You have to gather information on marketing channels, activities done over time across these channels, and overall market performance.
- You have to create the list of marketing objectives/goals and the opportunities for growth.
- You have to determine marketing niches you are at the moment not investing into and the reason why in the past you chose not to do it.
- You have to compare the profitability of products/services. What are your cash cows or their complete opposites? It is recommended to do similar cost/margin analysis for new products you are just planning to sell.
- Why are you trying new products?
- What are the difficulties/opportunities hidden in the launching of new product/service on market?
After all that, you have to create the brief problem statement and set the goal(s) the marketing department plans to achieve.
The next step is to develop a methodology for determining the available and suitable marketing channels/activities to put efforts and money in. For example, after the research you may decide that you need to encourage more intensively the free or cheap channels. In you case it can be keywords tagging, link-building, creation of inforgraphics, website translation, and social media. Provided the success of these activities, after some period of time you can understand the main target audience, which content is of the most interest for people or what keywords perform better.
Keep in mind that defining the good type of ad copy and keywords is a really important work that helps with the advancement of other marketing elements, such as SEO and content strategy. If you do the first right, you do not have to invest a lot of time in the latter. The half of the work is already done. On this stage, you also have to determine objectives for every marketing element.
You are almost finished. Now, you have to develop a brief and an good schedule for all marketing activities. You have to make clear who is responsible for what? Encourage the communication between different teams.
The last step is reporting and evaluating results. The previous steps have provided a lot of data analysis and report. It is crucial to determine the performance of the channel/activity to understand the growth potential and reallocate resources accordingly.
Image Credits: Google: Think Insights
Quick wrap-up
All companies need a thorough marketing strategy that helps them to stay on track of all the marketing techniques they are planning to implement. A well-developed strategy also can help to reallocate the marketing tasks to human forces more properly so that all the responsibilities were distributed equally. It is very important, because some companies make a mistake in putting all marketing on one single person who becomes stretched thin with other responsibilities. You can try to create your own marketing strategy based on the above-mentioned tips or you can come to seasoned professionals of Sunshine Digital Marketing Agency who have done a lot of marketing strategies for completely different industries and know how to create an excellent marketing strategy. You can get a free consultation here.
