The Importance of Implementing a Marketing Strategy
You’ve made the product, redefined a service offering to evolve with market changes, hosting a fundraiser or a company event. Now, you need to create and implement a marketing strategy to draw awareness and generate results that increase your chance of business success.
I love a good strategy just as much as the next person. As a business owner, your competitive advantage for each campaign or event is driven by a strategy. Unfortunately, so many opportunities fall through the cracks with little planning. It can be a complex place, and we want to help simplify it! In this blog, we dive into six steps your business can take to implement a marketing strategy of all sizes today and how implementing the actions outlined with your strategy is crucial so as not to miss out on opportunities. From data tracking to ROI optimization, mastering the GA4 dashboard, growing specific pillars of service, and planning the next company conference, a marketer’s life is all about strategy with a capital “S.”
What Is a Marketing Strategy?
Simply put, marketing strategy is the steps a business takes to reach its goals in various campaigns and marketing models to compete in its industry. It’s the deep dive into select parts of your marketing plan. It involves understanding what problem you solve, how you can solve a customer’s problem with your products and services, and what you need to reach those metrics set in the strategy.
To create an effective marketing strategy, here are four questions to ask as you start each strategy:
- Who are your customers?
- How do you motivate these people to buy/ continue to buy your products/ services?
- Who are your competitors? What are they doing to achieve results?
- How do you measure the success and effort of each marketing campaign?
Each campaign, event, or marketing project can have a different customer persona, motivation to engage with your business, or even find another place they like doing business with. For example, currently, your audience is an older generation, and you’ve uncovered an opportunity with a younger audience that you want to gain a competitive advantage in this space. As a result, you create a marketing campaign to grow your audience within your retail store. This example is a great start to a campaign with its own strategy.
Similarly to a marketing plan, when implementing a marketing strategy should cover the five Ps of marketing:
Product/ Services
What is it you’re looking to sell?
Price
What is your profit and budget to make this campaign a success?
Place
What channels or platforms need to be leveraged?
Promotion
What is it you’re looking to achieve? Is it to grow your social media presence, increase your SEO rank, promote a new product or get customers to attend a conference or event?
People
Who is your ideal customer? Who is not your ideal customer? You don’t want to attract the wrong customer is just as important as attracting the right customer.
Once you have answered these questions, each time you start a new marketing strategy, you are at a great advantage in building your strategy around your campaign or event.
6 Steps to Improve Implementing a Marketing Strategy
Whether a large corporation or just starting as a small business owner, every company needs a marketing strategy to drive business growth while building brand awareness of its products or services. Now that you’ve outlined your marketing strategy type, the next step is to implement and turn it into a reality.
As a business, implementation is the hardest part of reaching your growth goals. Too often, we get hung up in the red tape and formalities of creating a strategy or a plan. The result? We end up letting campaigns fall through the cracks that either become incomplete or the results lack success. We never dive in enough to uncover each campaign or event’s potential to drive growth. Because we are not willing to be held or hold others accountable, we sacrifice results.
So how can you implement a marketing strategy to get you results?
Set realistic expectations
Start by reviewing the goals of your strategy, the schedules of the team needed to help, and budgets that allow you to set realistic expectations for the strategy. Next, explore the risks that can impact the campaign. Other issues, no matter the runway to implement, can be team availability, delivery of resources, training, etc. It’s important that everyone, both internally and externally involved, is clear on the strategy and expectations.
Review your marketing strategy
Every marketing plan will most likely include several implementation strategies. Therefore, it’s important to routinely review your marketing plan to ensure your strategies align with those outlined in the plan.
Identify Resources
What will you need to implement a strategy? Can your internal team or marketer handle it? Or will you need outside support? These resources include content writers, event planners if it’s an event, graphic designers, project managers, and so on. So first, define your internal resources and which external resources you’ll need. For example, you may need to contract with a marketing firm for greater support and expertise.
With KMD, we can easily support marketing strategies on a campaign/event basis without you having to support a full internal marketing team.
Document the strategies
Each marketing plan will include many strategies. Therefore, you will need to document each strategy so you don’t miss elements and ensure the project team is equipped with the right tools and expectations.
Manage your project
Not only do your campaigns and events need actionable tasks, but it’s also encouraged to delegate a person to monitor and track progress to ensure deadlines are being met. Again, it’s not necessary but a great benefit to ensure success.
Measure results
Results can vary. Each strategy is different. For example, if your business has an upcoming open house, party attendees are an important measure. In contrast, you want to grow a particular service or product that may have a monetary value assigned as the measure. Lastly, each marketing project will have metrics that include time and cost spent on implementation.
So You Think You Want to Create a Marketing Strategy?
You don’t need a huge team to implement a strategy for every campaign or event from which you can reap benefits. However, even small businesses need marketing tailored to their brand to grow and interest people. After all, even with the best products or services, nobody will buy if they don’t know you exist.
Before diving into any strategy planning, it’s important to understand what you’re trying to accomplish. What does marketing success look like for you? If your marketing efforts work, what does that look like from campaign to campaign or event to event?
Be as specific, goals vary widely, but some of the most common goals are:
- Grow the organization
- Generate more leads
- Brand awareness
- Increased market share
Take time to create a very detailed strategy for your business and implement a strategy for each campaign or event to understand how your marketing efforts are moving the dial and allowing you to move forward with your big vision.
Do you think you need external support to implement an upcoming campaign or event? This kind of support can be a game-changer for your business. So if you’re ready to learn more about what it’s like to work with a digital marketing firm on a project basis, let’s chat!
