How to write a marketing strategy

For the past 16 years, we have been writing marketing strategies for companies ranging from start-ups and small to medium sized businesses, through to enterprise and government organisations.

While they differ in how the strategy is executed, the structure remains the same.

Starting from understanding the business goals, marketing strategies tend to be a combination of both a strategic overarching view of marketing, communications and brand, as well as a best-in-class tactical implementation plan. 

Where to start:

Business goals

How will your business change in 2020? What are the sales and marketing goals for the business? Is there any new products or services? What is your unique value proposition? Is your price point competitive with the market? Is there any new innovations that will help your business stand out from the market?

SWOT analysis

This is one of the most important parts of any marketing strategy. Your strengths need promotion, your weaknesses need work, your opportunities need leveraging and you can never forget about what your threats are and the risk that they have on your businesses success. What we do each year is write down an extensive list of weaknesses and then write down the opposite of those weaknesses. Each month we measure how close we are coming to reducing our weaknesses and turning those into strengths.

Brand

What does your brand stand for? What is its personality? What are your brand attributes? What is your brand story? How is it communicated? When is it communicated? Is your brand affected by outside factors? Does your brand live positively in the mindset of your customers from first point of contact through to end-of-life?

Sales goals

What are your company sales goals? What does your sales pipeline look like? How many leads do you need to get to achieve your sales goals? What does the customer journey look like? Where are your sales coming from? What margins do you have on what products and services?

Marketing Objectives

Your marketing objectives must align to your business and sales goals. That means that you need to “talk” to all stakeholders in order to develop a truly realistic set of marketing objectives.

Types of marketing objectives that many companies have include:

• Build brand awareness
• Improve social media engagement
• Implement a content marketing strategy
• Generate more leads

Marketing Tactics

Promotions:

What promotions will be you be holding in the next financial year. What do they look like? How are they integrated with other marketing tactics?

Advertising:

Do you have an advertising budget? What is the breakup between online and traditional advertising? What does your creative look like? What is the expected ROI?

Public Relations:

Where would you like to see stories on your company? What will the media write about? How frequently would you like to get media exposure?

Direct Mail:

What direct marketing campaigns will you hold over the next 12 months? What do they look like? What promotions or campaigns would you like to run? What followup will you do?

Electronic Direct Mail:

What EDM platform will you use? How frequently will you send out EDM campaigns? Do you have a database? Is it segmented? Do you have CRM software? Do you have email marketing software? Do you have marketing automation software?

Content Marketing:

Do you have a capability to post blogs on your website? How frequently will you post blogs? Will you syndicate your blogs or write guest blogs? What content will you place on social media?

Website:

Does your website clearly communicate what you do, how you do it and why? Is it well-branded in line with all your other marketing materials. Do you have social media icons on the top right hand corner? How frequently do you update your blog?

SEO:

Is your website search engine optimized? 

Awards:

Will you enter any awards? Have you budgeted for the cost of entering awards?

Events:

What events will you attend to network at? What conferences will you attend or have a tradeshow booth at?

Influencers:

Are there influencers in your industry? Are you communicating to your influencers?

Video Marketing:

Are you using video marketing? If not, why not? How will you use video marketing in the next 12 months?