‍What is a marketing strategy?

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A marketing strategy is a systematic plan to achieve your business goals by communicating with and selling products or services to your target audience. This involves analyzing potential customers and thus identifying corporate personas, researching the competitors, developing a unique selling point and selecting the best channels to reach the target audience.

To draw up an effective marketing strategy, it is important to understand customers, competitors and the market. This can be done by conducting market research, analyzing customer data, and examining trends in the industry. Marketing strategy is especially important to get the most out of a company's budget, where, for example, the business goal of the company is higher ROI (return on investment) or increased revenue.

Here you will get an introduction to what a good marketing strategy should include.

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Digital vs Traditional Marketing Strategy — What's the Difference?

A digital marketing strategy focuses on using digital channels, such as the internet and social media to reach the target audience and promote a product or service. This may include activities such as search engine optimization, email marketing, social media advertising and content marketing.

A traditional marketing strategy, on the other hand, focuses on using traditional channels such as television, radio, newspapers and posters to reach the target audience. It can include activities such as advertising in newspapers and magazines, radio advertising and television advertising.

In this post we will deal with digital marketing strategy.

The 7 most important steps

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1. Marketing Mix

The marketing mix is a key framework in a marketing strategy, as it represents the most important elements that must be considered and adjusted to ensure a good position in the market. This mix is also known as the four P's of marketing: Product (Product), Price (Price), Place (Location) and Promotion (Promotion).

Product refers to the physical product or service offered to customers and how it can satisfy their needs.

Price is related to how the product or service is priced, and how this affects the customer's decision to purchase it.

Place refers to where the product or service is available to customers, such as in stores or online.

Promotion deals with how the product or service is marketed, for example through advertising or promotional activities.

The four P's provide a framework for companies to decide what is important to do to achieve their goals for sales, profitability and market share. In addition, it is a good tool for assessing competitors and adapting to changes in the market and customer needs.

2. Identify goals

It is important that marketing has clear objectives, because they provide direction and focus for the company's marketing and sales activities. This helps to ensure the efficient use of resources, as well as that the company achieves its desired results. In addition, clear objectives can help create a common understanding and consensus between management, employees and other stakeholders about what is important to the company.

The objectives may, for example, be related to increased sales, earnings, market share or customer satisfaction.

Furthermore, these goals must be linked to the business objectives to ensure that marketing is in line with the company's overall strategy and that the company achieves the long-term goals. It also provides opportunities to measure the success of the marketing by tracking whether the set goals have been achieved, as well as any adjustments and improvements.

Business goals provide a broader perspective of what the company wants to achieve, while marketing objectives provide a specific approach to how this should be achieved through marketing.

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3. Marketing budget

A budget in a marketing strategy is important because it gives the company a clear view of what they can afford to spend on marketing and how the money should be distributed among different activities.

It also helps the company to set realistic goals and to measure the success of its marketing, as well as helping to limit overspending and increase efficiency.

For example, if the company is going to have a promotion for the summer, an overview of its costs will be extremely effective to be able to know what the company can afford to buy. This may include ads on Social Media and banners created by an external graphic designer.

4. Market and Competitor Analysis

It is essential to perform a market and competitor analysis to get an overview of the market in which one is located, as well as what works and does not work for the competitors. This can, for example, contribute to informative decisions related to product development, pricing, marketing and distribution.

In addition, competitor analysis can be useful in identifying opportunities such as standing out in the market or exploiting weaknesses of competitors.

There are various methods that can be useful when mapping a company's position in the market. Below we present three methods.

SWOT Analysis

• This method is used to assess the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the business.

Pestel analysis

• This method is mainly related to analyzing external factors that affect a business, such as political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legislative factors.

Competitor Analysis

• A method used to analyze competitors directly, by comparing products/services, prices, location and marketing.

5. Segmentation

Regardless of which strategy you are going to use, it is essential to have a desired target audience. A target audience is a characteristic of a group or category of people that the company wants to reach out to.

Effective marketing strategies are often worked out using detailed information about the target audience, thus creating the ideal personas of the company.

This will make your marketing easier, because you can hit your company's “personas” with relevant and personalized communications.

6. Selection of media channels

To find the right media channel for your marketing strategy, you first need to research your target audience and where they typically consume media.

Figures taken from Ipsos's SoMe Tracker (Q3 2022) a good source for viewing statistics on social media usage among the population. The chart below illustrates daily use of various social media sites broken down by age groups.

Knowing who your target audience is and which personas are ideal customers for your business, you can more easily personalize your communication and promote relevant content on the selected channels.

Examples of media channels include:

• Social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube or LinkedIn.
• Search engines like Google and Bing
• News and Entertainment Websites
• Podcasts and Video Podcasts

Example: A business that sells sports equipment may find that their target audience frequently uses Instagram and YouTube, and therefore choose to promote their products through influencer collaborations and product reviews on these platforms.

The illustrations below show the daily use of social media among the population, as well as the proportion of men and women with a profile on the media channels.

7. Market plan

‍Activity plan

An activity plan for a marketing strategy should contain an overview of the various activities that will be carried out in order to achieve the objectives set for marketing.

The activity plan should be timed and detailed, as well as provide an outline of what should be done, who will do it and when it will be done. It is important to follow up the activity plan to make sure that your company's marketing goals are achieved.

Publication schedule

A publishing plan is a plan that describes what, how and when to publish content on various platforms. This can be content on websites, social media, blogs or other channels.

The purpose is to ensure that relevant content is published, that you publish continuously and at specific periods.

Examples of Digital Marketing Strategies

Search Engine Optimization (SEO))

Optimization of site content to improve visibility and ranking in search engine result pages.

Search engine optimization is an effective marketing strategy because it helps your sites rank higher in the search results of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

The higher your site ranks, the greater the chances that users will visit it. This can lead to increased traffic, more conversions and increased sales.

SEO is a long-term strategy that can produce results over time. Compared to paid advertising, search engine optimization is less costly and it does not require continuous investment.

Social Media Marketing

Social media as a digital marketing strategy gives companies the ability to reach a large and targeted audience. At the same time, businesses can engage with users and build long-term relationships with potential customers.

Social media is an effective channel for driving more traffic to, for example, your website, where you can drive more sales or generate leads.

In addition, social media gives companies the ability to measure and analyze valuable data, making it easier to optimize for future and necessary actions. optimize, which provides valuable data to improve marketing.

For example, Meta's Business Suite is a tool where you can analyze data from Facebook and Instagram at the same time.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most direct ways to communicate with your target audience. It's fast, efficient, personalized and gives you the ability to generate broad reach, response, and potential leads.

At the same time, the results of email marketing are also very measurable. You can easily measure who has received the email, who opens it and who clicks on the attached links.

You can easily automate the measure through various CRM (Customer Relationship Management). However, this assumes that you use segmentation and personalization, so that you can customize content tailored to each individual consumer. ‍

Content Marketing

Content marketing is another type of digital marketing strategy. It gives you the opportunity to build long-term customer relationships and more personal relationships with your target audience by producing useful, relevant and free information.

This will help increase credibility and loyalty to your company and brand. At the same time, the chances that your target audience will convert to customer increases.

In addition, content marketing can help you increase your visibility in search engines, giving you greater exposure to potential customers.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing has proven to be a very effective strategy for many brands. But it assumes that the cooperation between the company and the person, as well as the product and/or service to be marketed correspond to what the influencer is doing.

A good example of bad influencer marketing would have been if a brand like Nike had made use of an influencer who didn't engage in physical activity or talk about exercise and health.