Top 15 Steps On How to Create a Marketing Strategy For Business Growth!

1. How well do you know your business?

Are you clear with what your business and its products are all about? Before jumping into the marketing funnel, you need to be clear enough to understand:

• What type of business are you, is it eCommerce, plain & simple B2B or B2C, service business, or some service or consulting agency?
• Are your products or services serving the desired quality?
• Are they unique enough to sell & strike an emotional connection with prospects?
• Do you know what different values your products are capable of adding?
• Are your costs of goods sold under control, are they competitive enough or customers are happy to pay?

You need to start from the grassroots level & understand the offerings you deliver are solid enough to market. Answer these questions with the help of business data you have been piling around. In case you are missing such information-based data, use your hunch or gut feel to realize & resolve these challenges to build a marketing pipeline.

2. Where do you see your business in say next 5 years?

Every business has a purpose, a goal, a long-term vision that it seeks to achieve over the years or during its lifetime. What are your ultimate goals, you wish to crush:

• Is it to produce more quality products or deliver more services?
• Is it to sell the maximum inventory?
• Is it to retain the existing customers?
• Is it to target the new segments, new customers, or new markets?
• Is it to hype the brand awareness?
• Is it to be a bigger brand in your industry by striking perfect brand positioning & perceptions?
• Is it to go from local to global?
• Or is it all of the above?

It’s very important to know what specific & possible goals you are trying to achieve before you could jump ahead to marketing gimmicks & steps.

3. Come on, Now Tell Us Your Marketing Goals

Now you need to address some practical marketing goals that you are anticipating. Every marketing method has a purpose, a whole intention behind it. What’s your intention to develop a marketing strategy/plan:

• Is it to generate organic lead & conversion?
• Is it to penetrate faster in the global markets online?
• Is it to win brand recognition & amazing impressions?
• Is it to drive traffic, reduce bounce rates & stick around the target buyers for long?
• Is it to open streams of revenue through various digital touchpoints?
• Or is it all?

Whatever “goals” you have thought for behind your marketing strategy, for business, make sure they are:

• • Achievable - Not impractical and very much impossible to achieve
  • Relevant - And contributes to your overall business goals (otherwise, it would waste your efforts)
  • Specified - Are you clear about what you are asking for?
  • Agile - Can it be pushed easily & quickly without much time, codependency, or additional resource requirements?
  • Flexible - Uncertainties are inevitable. Are your marketing goals up for them? Suppose market changes, technology upgrades, sudden layoffs happen, new heavy competitors enter, are your marketing goals flexible enough to take a detour to still manage to achieve the ultimate business goals?
  • Measurable - Can you track & evaluate its success? Or can you re-evaluate it in the further months or years?
  • Time-centric - Can you track it in terms of time? Like is it possible to achieve within a say 6 months or 9 months or a year (whatever timeline you set)?
  • In Sync with your team & departments - Are your marketers or departments on the same page regarding their obligations & the goals planned for ahead?

4. What’s Your SWOT Analysis? Ever Did That?

“A SWOT analysis is about asking a lot of questions around team & business stakeholders about what are your business’s key strengths & true weaknesses? What could be your opportunities? What could be dangers posing around?” - Author: Amanda Lang

Just knowing your company’s products or goals isn’t enough, you need to understand your ill areas or areas where you have ample scope to improve & give tough competition to your contemporaries.

It’s basically a data-driven, reality-based, fact-driven approach that explains the current & future potential of your business or its initiatives individually!

SWOT analysis will be like a healthy reality check for you, which can make you feel proud of what you achieved so far and also motivated enough to know what you could have done better to achieve more.

So here is how the abbreviation SWOT unfolds as:

S  stands for Strengths 

This area makes you analyze the core attributes that make you immune enough to stand & deliver in the market. It could be:

• Your product’s quality or uniqueness
• Affordable Price points
• Polite customer services
• Amazing inventory buyouts
• Or more such things you are proud about

W stands For Weaknesses

This could include the real weakness or challenges of your business. This could include your:

• Dying sales
• Poor communication channels
• Outdated technologies
• Lack of knowledge of latest markets
• Or more many things

O stands for Opportunities

This could include the next best steps that a company could take to grow & expand. This could be summed up as:

• New product entry
• Market expansion
• More quality to the product
• Types of more services
• International market takeover
• All such factors give hope that you can hustle & bag more improved business

T stands for Threats

Every business has some direct to indirect threats hounding over its head, which could be:

• Loss of product demand
• Increase in heavy competition
• Change in market taste & preferences
• And more such factors that could affect your business in basal or serious terms.

Knowing your SWOT will help in discovering the insecurities that you need to overcome with your market plan.

5. Not Everybody is Your Customer - Are you Selling to the Right People?

If you think everybody is your customer, then you are mistaken. Every business has its own set of intended customer base, with whom they want to share their:

• Brand value
• Product & services
• And marketing collaterals & messaging

To lay an effective foundation for marketing, you need to know who your real audience or target buyers are in the market. For that, you need to build a robust buyer’s persona, a detailed description of who your potential buyers are (could be), where their buying interest lies, what they look like, and their intentions behind using & disposing of a product/service, and every description that sums up your real customers’ thoughts & traits. 

You can identify your target buyers and profile their persona based on the following factors:

• Geography - If you are a local business in Arlington & are targeting there only, how can your target buyers be from Sydney?
• Demographics - What are the unique identifiers of your audience, like their age, gender, marital status, etc?
• Buying power - Are your products made for low-income groups or the luxury class?
• Psychographic - This is another factor based on which businesses should consider profiling their customers. This could include components like their goals, values, desires, lifestyle choices, emotions & values.
• Behavioral aspects - These aspects cover the attitudes, beliefs, rational intentions, or preferences behind buying a product or service.

By knowing these 5 aspects, you will know in favor of whom you need to align your marketing strategy & upcoming tactics with great personalization & innovation.

Here are some ways to research & find the right buyer persona for your marketing funnel:

• Create & invite visitors to fill out surveys
• Find your target through social media channels
• Check to whom your competitors are targeting
• Closely analyze your product & find out who is an ideal buyer for your products

6. Where Is Your Target Market Headed?

Now you know who your specific customers could be, but do you know what marketplace you need to target as a whole. The best part about putting yourself in an online marketplace is that you are limitless in targeting any market size, segment, or area, remotely. So sit down & understand, where is the market, where your target buyers are headed:

• Is it in the local market, the limited place where you are both offline & online?
• Is it in different regions?
• Is it the different nations across the globe?
• Or is it in the different industries?

Once you stumble upon your target market, do find out its scope, population, intensity, future, and growth prospects. Because based on them, your marketing strategy for the business will vary & differ for each of the market types you are catering to. 

For Example - if you are just in a local market, you will be needing local SEO efforts to market your business, while if your business market is headed globally and in different markets, you will need to strategize different aggressive marketing strategies inclusive of push marketing, viral marketing, or marketing automation, etc.

7. Do you Know Your Competitors too?

Don’t say you don’t have a competition. In this digital ecosystem, every business has either very strongly or loosely related competitors hanging around with their axe, waiting to chop you off from the market with their upbeat marketing strategy & tactics.

Knowing who you are competing against can help you outdo them & create a differentiation in the market, before them!

You don’t need to have Sherlock Holmes-type detective instincts to dwell on your competitors. You generally have 2 types of competitors:

Direct Competitors

Someone you should be serious about. You need to know the roots!

In this type of arrangement, your competitors will be selling similar products, services, or values just like yours. And your target customers will put both of you before the scale to complete their buying journey with either one of you.

Indirect Competitors

These competitors don’t sell the same product & still might be your competition as they might be delivering the same digital experience as websites or content as you are. So, they are in your business competition, digitally. 

An example of this could be --- Two businesses selling education online with different courses, but writing the same motivational type of copies to lure the attention of new-age digital learners (which both of you aim to target).

How to identify my competitors --- based on direct & indirect competition?

How to identify your direct competitor?

• Look at your product/service & find what names similar to your product in your region are very popular
• You can conduct the reader’s survey
• Have a feedback session to evaluate users brand options
• Be a part of social media communities, online forums
• Use social media posts, polls to understand the customers preferred choice

How to identify your indirect competitors?

• Do keyword research, you can search for the keywords you are planning to target & then can get the list of competitors ranking on them
• Search the keywords or the message you are meaning to deliver online. Find out the blogs, topics & see under which names they are published.
• Talk to your customers, they will tell you what other options they land up to when doing a search for your business’s keyword (remember that online learning platform example)

Knowing your competition isn’t taxing. You just need to put the right actions at play and you will find them. Knowing who your rivals are will help you have a vulture eye on their marketing strategies & actions & will motivate you to always do better than them.

8. Evaluate Your Business Resources - Time, Money & Manpower is all You Need!

To hit a successful road of marketing, you need to have an understanding of 3 things - Your monetary funds, timeline (because time is money), and manpower with true wisdom.

• What should be the marketing investment? If you are hitting the road without planning your funds, you can land up in great havoc. You need to plan how much money it's gonna cost you while planning & deploying the marketing endeavors (all based on your company size & investment). 

Experts say you should plan a marketing budget as 5-12% of your total revenue, in the case of B2C business. However, the outlay can be from little to mostly up from this, in the case of marketing for B2B or small businesses who are trying to create a mark from scratch. Be realistic with your business size & numbers & then figure out a budget.

• Set & anticipate practical timeline - How much time does a marketing plan & actions take to reap the results? Well, this can’t be pre-decided. But you need to be patient enough to see the results. The timeline can depend on the business type, size, and external or internal circumstances. To start seeing results, it can take up to 4 months, 9 months, or even more than 12 months, all depending on the complexities you have around. So you need to document a feasible & practical timeline, within which you would want to start seeing results.
• Manpower with true wisdom - Every business has different manpower with unequaled skills & this plays a very important step in defining the success of your business marketing strategy. You need to identify & understand your manpower at play to deal with 2 scenarios as follows:

Marketing roles are about looking deep within the layers & finding the remedying online marketing solutions that could help sell the product. It is way beyond applying simple, easy & timely steps. 

Find out if your markets have such a level of acumen to drive your strategy or not!

If all three resources are not in sync or up to the mark, you can focus on core business by hiring professional digital marketing services that act according to your budget & patience level!

9. Understand Users Marketing Funnel

“I know about sales & customers funnel, didn’t know there is funnel even in marketing” -  you must be thinking. Do you know a customer goes through 4 different stages before actually buying your product & turning into your long term-customer?Here are the 4 marketing funnel stages you should know & plan actions around.

Why do most businesses fail to get the desired action or conversion?

It’s because they don’t evaluate the path that it takes to convince & nurture the leads to convert. Most businesses simply jump into implementing the marketing methods, this is why they don’t reap the desired benefits. Dissecting and planning actions according to this marketing funnel can really help multiply your brand awareness and conversions in an expected manner.

10. Which Marketing Method are You in Favor of? Paid or Organic?

There are several channels to reach your target customers online & each channel has different marketing methods that you need to stay focused on. Some of the options are:

Other than these, you can lay your focus around brand marketing, video marketing, affiliate marketing, marketing automation, etc. No matter what online marketing methods you choose, they should be doable, measurable, according to the interest of your target audience, and flexible enough to amend last moment changes. Create a plan for each of these methods & see what type of actions you would like to bring forth to get the desired results & how.

In case, if you are still a fan of traditional marketing, you can plan around & give room to offline marketing methods as well, alongside the above online marketing methods like - billboards ads, print ads, live demos, telemarketing, sponsorships, discounts, holiday specials, and so much more.

Also, decide what type of free or premium marketing tools you will deploy under your given budget, for different realms of marketing like email, social media, content, SEM, etc to act upon your marketing needs.

11. How will you Create your Content & Creatives for Marketing Touchpoint?

Without great content & creative visuals, you can’t expect to get traction from your prospects. This is why you need to identify:

• What type of content or copies for internal & marketing collaterals you will be writing? Is it going to be a blog, articles, PR, social media snippets, case studies, videos, podcasts, community Q/A, guest posts, etc, or all of it?
• Who will be writing the marketing copies or content? Will you be self-writing or hiring the content strategists & producers to help with? Or who will be making the creatives & graphics to go along with the copies & content --- to make them more appealing?
• What type of content will you be planning for further writing at what keywords? For that, you can dig up research on the keywords & see what type of content your competitors are leveling ahead. Or you can even use tools like Google Trends to know what your prospects are in dire search of. And then while writing, plan a unique section or area in your blog or overall content that differentiates you from your competitors or explains your UVP. 
• Decide what platforms you will be targeting to deliver content, is it going to your internal blog, third-party guest posts & article sites, content syndication platforms, etc, or all of it?
• Decide now the frequency of your content, like how much content you will be targeting in what possible timeline.

12. Marketing Calendar for Real-Time Shared Visibility & Streamlining Actions

Do you know businesses who document their activities or actions via a marketing calendar are 538% more likely to achieve task completion? 81% of people who set monthly, quarterly, or yearly goals in writing, do actually achieve it!

A marketing calendar is a written plan of action, where you will be enlisting all the present or future tasks to be done in simple & doable format, in Excel, Google spreadsheets, Words, Google Docs, or PDFs (we would recommend using Google docs & sheets as they are safe & easily transferable). It covers:

• All the marketing activities that your marketing team would need to honor.
• It will showcase the authority, delegation & accountability of tasks by each marketing team member.
• Describe the assigned & delivery dates of performing each task or the urgency of performing certain tasks with a deadline.
• Status of what tasks have been accomplished, are on hold due to certain reasons or aren’t done.
• The results-driven from each marketing aspect on either a bi-monthly, monthly, quarterly or yearly basis.

You can either have one consolidated marketing calendar or divide it into different types of the calendar for more clarification & ease of pursuing the marketing initiatives:

You can decide any type of calendar & any number of calendars as to how it pleases you. But ensure the activities you plan are not set in stone with unrealistic targets, and sync with your goals, milestones, team size & efficiency, and your overall marketing efforts. And most of all it should be flexible & agile enough to be tweaked at the end time. 

Suppose the demand for a certain topic you were planning to write diminishes, team members call in sick to deliver on an urgent deadline, you have a sudden need to save chunks of marketing dollars, and other things like that. Your marketing heatmap should be ahead of time & prepared for all future uncertainties. This is why you need marketing experts around, who can help you pull a perfect game plan!

13. Establish & Measure KPIs & Metrics

Before you hit that publish button, do you have a roadmap to what metrics or KPIs you should be tracking your progress or effectiveness with? Do you know what measurable end objectives you need to achieve to understand your growth progress?

Don’t randomly shoot an arrow in the air, know what factors or outcomes you will be managing & measuring to define your ultimate marketing success. Here are a few examples of marketing metrics you can establish.

• For SEO your metrics or KPI could be - Inbound links, impressions, clicks, website authority, page or domain authority, SERP visibility, ranking, traffic, load speed, etc.
• For content marketing, your metrics could be - Social shares, likes, comments, dwell time, form filling, interlinking effectiveness, lead inquiry & so on.
• For PPC ads, your metrics could be - Ad revert, click-through rate, per click cost, impressions, conversion rate, and so on.
• For email marketing, your metrics could be - Increasing subscribers list, open rates, email clicks, traffics & share, and revert as lead inquiry.
• For social media, your metrics could be - Like, share, comment, views, on each post, increasing followership, reader engagement, the building of the right connection with the targeted demographics & so on.

These were a few examples of KPIs you can set & track the performance of your marketing campaigns with. You can use tools like Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, Semrush, and HubSpot to track down all the efforts & outcomes.

Other than these basic metrics, there are certain other broad metrics you need to positively harness through each & every marketing method & touchpoint, altogether you leverage:

14. Find Your Brand’s USP & Voice

To be able to connect in an emotional yet rational context with your prospects through your manifold marketing collaterals, you need to figure out what would be your:

• USP - Unique Value Proposition - That will stand you apart from the crowd & make your offers & whole existence worth exploring & trusting over others, by your prospects.
• Your Brand unique - A unique brand messaging that strikes a connection without your prospects more emotionally & intellectually. For building a brand, you need to follow branding strategies and know the essential components of brand development strategy.
• Distinct name & tagline - To be able to market yourself better, you must have a powerful name & a catchphrase that seeks attention & interest from distance.
• Creative graphic & typography - Do you have distinct & exemplary graphics & typography planned that make your marketing collateral worth standing out? If not, plan it!
• Improved digital UI & UX - Marketing products alone won’t help, if your UI & customer experience over the web is not enticing enough. If your landing pages are still struggling to share a cohesive brand story & don't offer amazing color coordination, visual & narratives, and CTAs, you need to brush up your digital presence with effective website design services!

15. Test the Waters - Did you Get What you Expected?

Lay down your marketing strategies on the real shore. Experiment & see where you are actually able to narrow the gaps between your visions, actions & the ultimate results. See what worked for you & what didn’t. Not every business marketing strategy is meant to reward you with profitable actions. So don’t just plan, implement & see the outcomes. Stick around a bit & monitor the activities, and if you see certain actions are blocker in your way & would cost your marketing dollars, wastefully. In that case, be agile and flexible enough to remove them at the right time.

For example - You planned a 15 days sprint & set some goals to bring about 5% conversions & it didn’t happen until the sprint ended. Then don’t disappoint, you can look through & find what steps went wrong & didn’t perform well. Or it could be your timeline that was impossible & too unrealistic, maybe try changing that.

The Key is to be patient. Business Marketing Strategy is all about experimenting & working in continuation to see what works for you or whatnot. There is no perfect road or destination in the case of marketing. It is just over the time wisdom you achieve that helps you do better each time.