Marketing Strategy Guide: How to Create a Marketing Strategy

A marketing strategy is a cohesive alliance of a company's marketing efforts, all directed toward a single sales goal. Startups, small businesses, and large corporations build strategic campaigns to reach a target market through various marketing strategies involving both traditional and digital marketing channels.

Traditional marketing involves methods used throughout the twentieth century such as TV advertising, radio advertising, direct mail, billboards, print advertisements, and personal persuasion campaigns. It can also involve retail strategies such as package design and placement on store shelves.

Digital marketing involves types of marketing like content marketing, digital ad marketing, and social media marketing.

1. 1. Content marketing: Content marketing includes coordinated marketing efforts that provide potential customers with relevant text, video, and audio content. Examples include advertising memes, entertaining videos, podcasts, and blog entries.
2. 2. Digital ad marketing: Digital ad marketing includes digital channels such as web ads, podcast ads, email marketing, and webinars. Unlike content marketing, digital marketing is focused on actual ads rather than content that may or may not contain information about your business.
3. 3. Social media marketing: This digital marketing method engages new customers on social media platforms. Social media advertisements may look nearly identical to standard web-based advertising, or they may be customized to a particular platform.

Traditional marketing and digital marketing come together in what is known as a marketing mix. A marketing mix is an amalgam of different marketing outreach methods from both the digital and traditional spheres. Successful brands determine a marketing mix based on their overall marketing strategy. The teams know the type of customer they are targeting, and what types of media those people consume—from billboards to newspapers to television shows to social media. They use this knowledge to craft a customized marketing mix for the product.

The process of marketing a new product will vary depending upon your sales channels and personnel resources. With that in mind, use this nine-step template to set your marketing strategy in action, connect you to your intended customer base, and bolster your bottom line.

1. 1. Assess the competition. A clear-minded view of the competition can help you better define the niche for your own product. It can also help you learn how competitors sell products. Do they emphasize online marketing or traditional advertising? How much do they charge? What does the landing page on their website look like? Such research provides a competitive analysis, allowing you to compare your new product to products already on the market. It also helps you assess what unique value proposition your company's product can offer customers.
2. 2. Conduct price research. Pricing research and case studies help a company find an acceptable price point for a new product. Gleaning price information from the current market will help you craft your own business strategy.
3. 3. Use customer research to create a buyer persona. A market research team can study your company’s existing customer base to identify demographic trends and customer pain points. You can then use this information to create a buyer persona for your target audience. A buyer persona is a fictional representative of the target customer base your company seeks to engage. Buyer personas feature an intersection of demographic information, including factors such as age, gender, race, income, family size and marital status, occupation and job title, political views, personal values, hobbies, and attitudes toward current trends. This information helps you tailor your company’s marketing to specific types of customers who fall within your target market.
4. 4. Begin creating advertising content. Once your company has established its buyer persona, the content creation teams can begin crafting inbound messaging language to appeal to that target audience.
5. 5. Choose your marketing channels. Digital marketing teams can launch a campaign to reach target customers on websites and search engines, and then direct users to a landing page on the company website—often an e-commerce page. If your budget allows, you may use traditional media sales teams to purchase short-term ad buys on TV and radio.
6. 6. Network with influencers. Your digital and social media teams may want to employ relevant influencers to pitch the product. Some influencers demonstrate product features on social media. Others take to blogging and provide in-depth written reviews. If you can forge alliances with either professional influencers or simply influential people, you can reach audiences in ways that automated advertising algorithms cannot.
7. 7. Link up with other professionals. To perfect your marketing strategy, consider enlisting the services of a product marketing manager. At the very least, use online tools that can help you reach your target customers. Various services can help you establish and maintain an email list. Take advantage of online targeted ad services as well.
8. 8. Audit your results, and keep adjusting. Regularly convene with your marketing team to review sales figures, subscriber growth, and any other relevant metrics. Then, engage in relevant retargeting to reach an even wider span of new customers. This means that launching your marketing campaign is really just the beginning. You will be assessing and refining your marketing for as long as you run your company.
9. 9. Tailor your ads to your audience. Using analytics tools from web advertising vendors, you can learn about your target audience based on their online behavior. Use geographic or behavioral characteristics of your engaged audiences and further craft campaigns to reach such people. Marketers can further promote the visibility of marketing content via search engine optimization (SEO).

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