How to plan a marketing strategy?

Source: Unsplash.

So... you want to learn how to plan a marketing strategy?

Great, we might be your best teachers for this practice. 

We are proud to say that in CodeDesign we have helped thousands of businesses to develop successful marketing campaigns, and to prove these metrics are on our side with an 86% of client retention and a recommendation score from our customers of 376% higher than the market average. Not only this, but high-profile clients such as Microsoft or Nestlé fully trust our experience to manage their digital marketing strategies.

When you build a marketing strategy you are looking to grow your business by capturing the maximum mind share at a lower cost, and in this case, we give you hand and provide this complete guide on how to plan a marketing strategy?

Are you ready for this?

Awesome, keep scrolling! 

Define your objective!

Starting a campaign without a clear objective is the same as gambling, which we do not recommend you do with your investments because you may not hit the jackpot. On the other hand, it is much more comfortable to play it safe, or better yet, start your journey with an end in mind.

So, what are you mainly looking for in your company? Rather than aiming for generical objectives like brand awareness or website traffic, you want to focus on metric-driven marketing goals, something that seems more tangible and can be measured. So, instead of vague accomplishments try to be specific by 

• Increasing leads by 5%
• Get 100 new followers on Instagram
• Improve conversion rate by 10%
• Decrease bounce rate by 3%
• Create a webinar and get 500 new leads.

Once you define your goal you have to make sure that it is a SMART one, but we are not writing this word in big letters just for aesthetics, it is an acronym. It stands for:

• Specific: Make sure that your objective is clear as water, so everyone in your team can easily understand and start working towards it.
• Measurable: Your goal needs to be tangible, not something ethereal. KPIs help you understand if you have accomplished your goals or not and check out if your efforts paid off and how they translate to revenue.
• Achievable: We like to dream big, but we want to be realistic because once you achieve smart goals you can start going for the bigger prices. So ask yourself if you really have all the team and resources to succeed in this challenge, or if you are just setting up yourself for failure.
• Relevant: Does your goal align with the characteristics of your online business? Will it help you advance your business or will it be irrelevant? Once you answer these questions you can give a "GO" or a "DON'T" to your goal and start working on it.
• Time-bound: Once you find the what and why of your goal, is it good to set a when for it? This will help you put pressure or end date on when you should achieve or start measuring the fruits of your work.

Very well, we have already achieved how to set intelligent objectives, but now it is time to answer how we are going to plan our strategy?

Source: Unsplash.

Find your Unique Selling points

What makes your business different from competitors? What makes it better and greater and most importantly, how it can solve your customer's problem? This is your power, the sword you own to battle competitors and stand out as a winner. 

So how do you find it?

For that, you have to create a FAB analysis, which stands for Features, Advantages, and Benefits. With an ABM statement you will your product's feature, what it does and why is an advantage, and how that benefits your prospective clients.

Once you find all the features and advantages you have to turn them into marketing & sales messages, so you can start offering a solution for all those clients that look for your type of services, which helps you connect more effectively with them. To create your FAB statement follow these 3 steps:

1. Group a list of your product features.
2. Check each of your features and write one or two advantages of everything.
3. Get in your client's shoes and develop a benefit for each advantage. Make sure to investigate deep down on each of their necessities, find what is their true desire.

Once you find this you have a hand full of ideas to share your marketing message. But this is not the last part, now it's time to flip the FAB statement. To do this now you start from the benefit and explain how you accomplish with your advantage feature.

Source: Unsplash.

Write a Simple Executive Summary

Once you have your marketing plan it is time to pitch it to your prospects. It has to make them feel excited about what is coming, not bored of the same old tactics. To do this you can use an executive summary in which you introduce all the things you are aiming for this month or year.

When you write it make sure to include things like:

• Simple marketing goals
• Crucial company facts
• Information about your brand
• High-quality metrics
• Future goals

As we said above, make them excited not bored, for this make a quick presentation,  two paragraphs are enough, that grabs their attention and make them feel excited about future.

In your executive summary, you want to tell your users about how their companies will grow and overcome competitors.

Source: YouTube.

Describe your Buyer Persona

Who are you selling to?

Are 25-year-old men that struggle with beard growth? Is it 60+ adults that look for life insurance? Whatever the case, you have to describe them on a deep level that goes from how much do they earn to deep facts about their feelings. The idea is not to sell to everybody but the right people, because as you start solving their issues they will keep coming back to your business.

To start a sketch about the buyer personas you can:

• Interviewing your customers
• Researching similar businesses and seeing who are their customers
• Surveying your clients

Ready with this part now you can start to look for more information on them, to do this you can segment it into two categories:

Infographics	Psychographics
Age  Job Location Activities Hobbies	Pain points, what is that issue they face that you can solve? How do you want them to feel about your services? What are their challenges? What are their goals?

Finally, you have a buyer persona, or even better, a group of personas that describe who you are targeting and you know more clearly how you can communicate with them. When you identify many types of buyer personas you find out that they all have different challenges that your product could solve, and so, you have to communicate differently to each of them, something you could achieve with an Account-Based Marketing Strategy.

Now you may believe that we are joking... But naming each of your buyer personas makes it even more personal, which helps you to draw a better character for your type of customer.

Investigate your competitors

Now grab a magnifying glass and your best suit to start with a Sherlock Holmes type of job! Let's find out who are your competitors and what they are doing?

So, let's begin to solve this mystery by answering these crucial questions:

• Who is their marketing?
• What are their prices?
• Who is their leadership team?
• What are their marketing tactics? Social media strategy?
• What channels do they use?
• What type of content do they create?
• Their success stories and yearly growth
• Who are their users and buyer personas?

Then take a close look into what strategies they use like:

• Blog writing
• YouTube Videos
• Infographics
• SEO marketing
• Email marketing
• Social media ads

Study them objectively so you can identify what are their strengths and weaknesses so you can find how you can exceed them in all those aspects. To do this you can use a SWOT analysis, another acronym that stands for strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Then separate competitors from primary to secondary ones. For example, Apple's primary competitors could be Samsung, while any other tablet's producer could be their secondary.

Source: YouTube.

Be present: How are you right here and right now?

Don't get us wrong, this isn't the usual corny self-help book advice it's a pretty effective philosophy for any aspect of your life, including of course creating your digital marketing strategy. We cannot point to the future without having an idea of how we are at this moment since by analyzing our present we can decipher what we must improve for our future.

You have to set the baselines so you can track how your marketing strategy is performing, what is working and what you should work harder to improve.

Make your strategy actionable... and visual

We are close to the final steps for your strategy, now what remains for us is to create a roadmap that makes it clear to everyone in your team how and when each of the tasks will be done?

Making it visual is more pleasing to the eyes since it is not just millennials who have gotten sick of reading so much text, anyone on your team will feel more comfortable seeing a roadmap, an infographic, or even a video, than a dumb document. with too much text.

Create your activity map and make it clear to each part of your team what they should do and how with their specific deadlines to achieve everything on time.

Source: Unsplash.

Choose your Marketing Channels

The last part is time to find what channels do your customers frequent the most to take your strategy to all of these platforms.

As always, social media is our go-to platform, so we have to research which of them they are surfing looking for services. Then define what you'll use this social platform for and how you'll measure success in it. 

Remember, you don't need to be on every platform, just the ones that your customers use. Don't lose money in the wrong places...

Source: Unsplash.

Financial Projections

With all things ready for a successful campaign, now it's time to define how much you'll spend on each tactic and the expected Return on Investment. As we said, these are projections for the year so it won't be 100% accurate. Nevertheless, when you are managed by a great digital marketing agency chances are that you will see your revenue grow more than you would have thought.

Start your campaign!

As one of our customers, Nicolette Holmes, the founder of Gecko Yoga, said...

"CodeDesign's strategy was a great jumping-off point for us, and we are starting to see steady growth."

In our team, we always look to deliver incredible results and solutions for our customers, and that is because we focus on creating a personal strategy for each of them and their needs. We care about our client's success by giving the best of our team of professionals to make their business go right into financial success.

 

CodeDesign is a leading:

- Digital agency,  

- Amazon marketing agency, and

- Magento Developer

Feel free to contact us to see the unprecedented growth of your business.

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