Creating a Killer Marketing Strategy for Your Business Plan in 2023
The marketing world is barely into the second quarter of 2022 and has already seen some major shifts in the industry. From the rise of short-form video content to conversational commerce, shoppable links, and the Metaverse, the post-pandemic market is bringing forth several trends and forcing companies to revamp their marketing strategies to keep pace with the developments.
Businesses have to be more fluid and transition to succeed in the new normal. They need to adapt according to the changes in their respective industries to stay ahead of the curve. However, when it comes to creating a marketing strategy, there’s a lot to consider.
The details are enough to confuse even the savviest marketers, from your communication channels to branding, customer segmentation, and everything in between. Therefore, in this post, we’ll share how to create a killer marketing strategy for your business in 2022 by diving into the most critical components.
5 Steps to Creating a Killer Marketing Strategy in 2022
1. Start With Your Marketing Plan
You’re probably thinking this sounds rather redundant or counter-intuitive, considering they’re both the same thing. Rest assured, they’re not. A marketing strategy aims to provide the bigger picture for your team in terms of resource requirements, goal setting, and timeline. A marketing plan is your team's specific actions to execute that strategy.
Based on market behavior, building a marketing plan can be a trial and error process. Here’s what it usually entails:
▪ Preparing a mission statement
▪ Describing your products and services
▪ Outlining your marketing goals and the competitive landscape
▪ Identifying your target audience and creating a value proposition for them
▪ Developing a timeline and budget
▪ Adopting different marketing tools and channels for strategy execution
2. Customer Segmentation and Buyer Personas
Customer segmentation is one of the most important steps in creating a solid marketing strategy. One of the oldest marketing rules is that you cannot sell to everyone. Therefore, you need narrowly define your target market by grouping them into different segments in terms of demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and geographic factors.
These include age, gender, education, location, religion, lifestyle, social class, purchase history, personality, income, profession, etc. Using these factors, you can create buyer personas for your products and services and get snapshots of your ideal customers.
The good news is you don’t have to do this with a pen and paper. You can find several persona builder tools and platforms online to help you identify, understand, and reach your audience. Popular examples include Versium and Hubspot.
3. Select the Appropriate Tools and Channels
Once you have your target audience in place, you need to ensure you equip your team with the right tools and platforms to reach out to them and measure your overall performance. Popular examples include:
▪ Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that allows marketers to identify trends and patterns, collect data, and visualize their website performance to generate key insights for improvement. Simply put, it can help you track your data and KPIs, find out how your website is performing, and discover where your best buyers or users are located.
▪ Facebook and Google Advertising
Both Facebook and Google have come a long way since their inception. Google started as a search engine, while Facebook was a place for people to interact online. However, both platforms have grown into powerful marketing tools. Using Facebook ads, you can target a specific audience based on age, sex, and online behavior.
Similarly, with Google ads, you can target specific keywords and buy your way to the top of search results while you organically boost your ranking with search engine optimization.
▪ Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing channels companies employ to dispatch their promotional content to their target audience and persuade them to take the required action. However, this involves getting the recipients' prior consent before you can legally contact them.
Many people use lead magnets, such as survey forms, questionnaires, trial services, and limited-time offers to get users to subscribe to their email campaigns.
Other marketing management tools include:
▪ Trello
▪ TrueNorth
▪ SEMrush
▪ Buzzsumo
▪ Crazy Egg, etc.
4. Refine Your Execution Plan
Next, you need to set a balanced combination of marketing tools and channels from your arsenal to get the best out of your budget and team. Here, you can divide your assets into paid, owned, and earned media categories.
For instance, paid media include Google and Facebook ads, as mentioned above. However, it could also include television, direct mail, and other offline/online channels. You can also create your own media, such as videos, blogs, articles, product descriptions, ebooks, and infographics.
Finally, earned media or user-generated content includes tweets, influencer videos, shoutouts, and other mentionings on mainstream or social media.
5. Bring Everything Together
At this point, you should have a clear vision of your marketing strategy. Now, all you need to do is compile everything together and assign actions to your plans by creating a road map encompassing all the steps needed for proper execution in a specified timeline. When creating this document, think long-term as this strategy will be used as a blueprint for all your future campaigns.
Bottom Line
Creating a killer marketing strategy doesn’t happen overnight. It requires hard work, commitment, resources, and time to ensure you reach your target audience properly and effectively. Using the steps in this post, you can simplify some of the processes and save time developing a strategy for your brand and products.
Remember, it all falls to research and resource management. If you can handle these two aspects properly, you can meet your reach, sales, and revenue objectives.
