How to Create a Marketing Strategy in 6 Steps
Creating a marketing strategy requires that you follow a process. It’s a series of decisions at each step in the process that customises your marketing for your customer. However, knowing where to start can often be frustrating, and throwing together a few blog posts and Instagram photos probably won’t go further than friends and family.
Some online advice can also be too generic. They may instruct you to follow a plan which just doesn’t seem suitable for your brand or customer. And of course, if everyone followed the same recipe, customers won’t be able to tell us apart.
A marketing strategy requires decisions before sending random Tweets. Decisions which guide your thinking both in the long and short term. And following the proper process will mean your marketing campaigns are more effective.
So, here are the 6 steps and decisions you will need to make to create a marketing plan that will help your customer’s get their wallet out.
1. Break up the market.
Marketing can be messy. It’s hard to please all of the people, all of the time. It’s your first job, through segmentation, to get a top level view of the market so you can begin to begin to untangle the mess.
The problem is that different customers have different needs. The solution that segmentation offers is that it starts to give you a clear picture of what people might want.
The first place to start is with segmentation mapping. Segmentation is the practice of breaking up the market into niches (or segments). By breaking down the market, you can see which types of customer needs you can address best.
For example, in the car market, a new driver under the age of 25 with low income who is motivated by their new found freedom will have different wants and needs to a 45 year old driver who uses their car to commute to work and as a symbol of their authority and success. These are two quite different segments in the market, but both still want a car. A car manufacturer will create different cars, at different price points with different messaging so that it is desirable to the relevant customer.
There will be plenty of segments in each market. Customer’s may have different needs because of their age, job, location and so on. It’s your job talk to the customer and begin to work out the different groups in the market, and put them on paper so you can visualise the whole market.
Below is an example of a segmentation map for a company which sells CRM software. It gives us a view of the market, as well as number of customers and other marketing data. Having this knowledge, we can move on to the next two steps.
2. Pick your customers and 3. Position your brand.
So the market looked messy. But segmentation cleared that up for us. So what now?
Once the you have a full view of the market, you can then begin to pick the segments your company can best compete in. By choosing a combination of segments, you can customise your product to meet their specific needs, and design your messaging to empathise with their problems and offer them your solution.
Your next job is to decide which segments you want to target. Of course, this also means choosing who you’re not going to target. That doesn’t mean you won’t sell to them, it just means you’re gearing yourself up to better serve some sets of customers than others which makes you more competitive than rival brands for these customers.
Choose your targets. And choose them wisely. Because we now need to decide what it is we want them to think of us, and to make sure they think of us at all.
Positioning is what how we want the customer to perceive us. By choosing a unique combination two or three attributes (such as sporty or classy, for example), you can differentiate your brand from competitors. By targeting and positioning, we can offer a group of customers a desirable alternative.
Below is a positioning map for drinks sweetener from Harvard Business Review.
The two competitive areas which brands compete on, according to this perceptional map, are identity-function and commerce-culture. Moleskin’s positioning is located in the upper right-hand quadrant of identity and culture. It will aim to carve out a competitive advantage through positioning itself as a notebook that represents a culture and individual identity, against a more commercial set of competitors.
By now, you’ll know who your customers are, and why they’ll want to buy from you. Now you’ll need to understand what the stages your customer goes through before they buy from you. Even the stages before they realise they’re in the market for your product.
4. Set your Marketing Objectives.
So far, you’ve chosen your target segments you have your brand positioning. This means your now strategically competitive. However, what happens next?
Well, you need to understand why customer’s aren’t buying from you. If you know the answer to this, you can begin fixing the problems. Here, a sales funnel is a marketer’s secret weapon and fixing the leaks in the funnel will patch up your company accounts.
The sales funnel is the unique journey a your customer goes through from cradle to grave — from ignorance to brand advocate. Every customer will follow some form of gaining awareness, showing interest, a purchasing decision and some level of customer satisfaction. Your job is to work out the steps your customers go through.
Measuring and locating the weak areas gives the marketer a strategic view on what its communication planning must achieve in the next stage. If you have good levels of converting sales, and happy customers, but many people don’t know who you are, then your job is to change that. And if lots of people know who you are, but your sales conversions are lower than your competitors, then that is the area of focus.
So understanding the customer journey is the first job, and the second is to try and put numbers against each step. Only by doing this can you begin to focus your marketing objectives to areas which will give you the biggest return for your effort. Even if you guesstimate your numbers, it’s a good starting point.
So, your objectives should include the weak areas of your sales funnel plus your target market. This way, we know what we want to happen and where.
For example:
- Increase aided awareness from 20% to 25% in the Big Spenders category segment by 30th March, of this financial year.
Or…
- Increase Market Share from 14% to 18% in the Cheap and Cheerful segment by 30th March, of this financial year.
Only now are you ready to go to market. Everything you’ve done so far is the ground work for what you need to do next.
5. Plan what you want to say, and how you’ll say it.
Now you know what you need to do, let’s look at how to do it. You need to pick which marketing channels you want to use(e.g. Sponsorship, Social Media, Email etc) but, some are better for different stages of the sales funnel. So you will need to match the marketing channels you use to suit your objectives. Sponsorship is better for early funnel stages (awareness), while email is better for later funnel stages (leads/sales).
An appropriate blend of channels is most effective for any marketing plan. Studies show that using multiple channels is more effective than just one. So, you’ll need to make a judgement on which channels suit your objectives, target market and positioning. The graph below gives examples of the channels that are useful for brand awareness (bottom right) and those which are more salesy (top left).
Next, creative and messaging enter.
Your messaging should flow straight from your positioning. By framing your positioning as a benefit driven headline, you can offer the customer a better alternative. So what is the ultimate benefit you bring your customer, and what problem are you solving your way?
Crafting a message and idea that resonates with your audience is an art. Coming up with the ‘Big Idea’ is worth putting time and effort into as studies show that campaigns with better creative are more effective commercially. A good place to start is by asking ‘how can I demonstrate or dramatise the benefit I bring to my target market?’.
To read more about effective creative read David Ogilvy’s ‘Confessions of an Advertising Man’. The book is clearly very dated, but some of the core ideas are still as true today than they were in the 1960’s.
Bring together you benefit driven headline, and you dramatised/demonstrated creative for the basis of your communications campaign. Now you have something you can look at ready to push out to the world. But the big question now is, how much do you spend on promoting it?
6. Set your budget
Yes, there can be a ‘sort of science’ to budget setting. There’s a phenomenon in marketing, to do with market share and relative advertising spending. By understanding market share and what our competitors are spending, we can set our budgets to ensure they are effective.
This is a bit technical — but worth knowing. Ready? Here we go in three steps.
First, a definition of share-of-voice (SOV). SOV is your brand’s relative advertising spend compared to the market, represented as a percentage. For example, if an entire industry advertises on one page of paper, and you buy a quarter of that space, then your SOV is 25%. Ok so far?
Second, any advertising spend over your market share, as a percentage, is called excess-share-of-voice (ESOV). So, If our market share was 15% and our SOV was 25%, our ESOV is 10% (25% SOV minus 15% market share equals 10% ESOV). This is an interesting figure for the following reason.
And thirdly, with all things being equal, for every 10% ESOV, you can typically can expect a 0.5% market share gain per year. That suggests, if a brand commands 15% market share, they would require 25% SOV (therefore 10% ESOV) to gain 0.5% market share.
So what does this mean for you? Well, you need to guesstimate your market share and your competitors market share. Then, guesstimate your advertising spend and your competitors advertising spend. Work this all out in percentages and you can adjust you spend to ensure you’re spending at least 10% ESOV.
Basically, you need to punch above your weight when it comes to advertising. Advertising acts as a weak force. And it requires a long-term approach and a meaty investment, but it works.
Wrap it up by putting all the above together in a succinct document that will guide the heart, head an wallet in marketing execution, and hopefully end in great commercial success.
If you enjoyed this, then you may be interested in the following. What we’ve been through today is a just a ‘brief’ overview of what you need to do to create a marketing strategy. For those developing marketing plans in startups, a more detailed and workable two day marketing strategy plan can be found here — https://www.brandwerks.agency/products/the-two-day-marketing-strategy
