4 Steps To A Powerful Marketing Strategy To Grow Your Business

If you are starting to put a marketing strategy together, you may have discovered bits a pieces but haven’t found a method pull it all together. Assuming you have decided what product or service you are going to promote, your next step is build a marketing strategy. It will help guide you on how and where to execute your plan and keep you on track for success.

An effective marketing strategy guides your business’s marketing initiatives.

Now, more than ever it is important to have a focused plan so that you stick to the tactics that your business will benefit from the most. Without a strategy you will try all kinds of marketing tactics and it will be hit and miss.

An effective marketing strategy will help guide you and help you choose the marketing tactics that will have the most impact like promoting your blog posts, creating a PPC campaign or creating an affiliate program. Before we get right into it, here is some clarification on some terms that are often confused or misunderstood…

UVP vs USP?
The company’s unique value proposition (UVP) and unique sales proposition (USP) should be central to the marketing strategy. The UVP is a short statement that sums up your business and what it has to offer. It acts as a guiding principle for all of the company’s business decisions.

What’s a good example of a great UVP?:
“We help non-profit organizations with awareness campaigns”.

A USP on the other hand speaks directly to your target market and tells them why they should care. A good USP comes from having a deep understanding of who your customers are, what they want and why they want it.

What’s a good example of a great USP ?
Vistaprint: Fast, Cheap Printing for Growing Businesses on a Budget

Check out this post from Wordstream: How to Write a Ferociously Unique Selling Proposition.

Marketing Strategy vs Marketing Tactics?
These terms are often used interchangeably but they are distinctly different. Tactics are the methods you will use to implement your marketing strategy. See “Marketing Tactics” below.

Marketing Strategy vs Marketing Plan?
These terms are also used interchangeably at times but a Marketing Plan is a document that details the various marketing activities a company conducts and outlines the budget and timeline for implementing various marketing initiatives.

Here are 4 key steps to creating a powerful marketing strategy with measurable results:

1 | Do your research
2 | Do competitive analysis and discover your target audience
3 | Position & differentiate from your competitors
4 | Set your goals

1. Do your research

Some say you should set your goals first but we find it effective to have some goals in mind but do some research before you lock into your goals. Why? Don’t just go with your gut here. Research is a must when it comes to building a strategy. It’s impossible to set goals and plan unless you know what you are up against with your competition. Even a little research is better than none at all but know that if you don’t know the full picture, you could fail and not understand why.

Your ultimate goal might be extremely difficult to reach so you may need to reach some other smaller, short term goals to lay the groundwork to make it easier achieve your larger goals. For instance your research may indicate that a brand awareness campaign is what you need to do first in order reach your long term goals more effectively.

Here’s a different type of example of moving forward without doing enough research. If you plan an SEO strategy, you will likely start with keyword research. You use a keyword tool and find out some long-tail keywords that have great search volume and a low KD (Keyword Difficulty) score. You think, great, I can rank high in no time and proceed to write an epic blog post. However, when you look at the first page results for that keyword, every position is filled with big brands like Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot. Your time was wasted — there is no way you will outrank them.

By the way, the example above comes from personal experience. OUCH. Time was not completely wasted though. I did learn from it. I also re-purposed the content by making a video and a downloadable cheatsheet. Then posted it in various places like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest to get social traffic and syndicated it on Medium.

The point is, do in depth research and it will pay off. Here the things you should do to prepare your marketing strategy:

Do Market Research that is Qualitative

A qualitative approach is essential for gaining a broad understanding of the underlying factors affecting consumer behaviour. This is a very large topic on it’s own and I would suggest you go well beyond this article to really understand it’s value. Here is one excellent and easy to understand article from OptinMonster called 7 Qualitative Research Methods for High-Impact Marketing.

You want to make sure you get all the vital data like demographics and consumer behaviour so that you can make solid decisions.

2. Do competitive analysis and discover your target audience

In a competitive analysis, you identify your competitors and analyze their strategies in order to determine if your brand has any weaknesses or strengths compared to them. An analysis of the competitors often involves a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) , which helps to develop a competition marketing strategy. Here is a great article on how to do a SWOT Analysis. This will help you decide what audience segments to target.

Visme has all kinds of helpful tools including this great collection of SWOT templates for various types of businesses.

Where are you going to keep track of all this market research information?

Not long ago I would have recommended Excel Spreadsheets but today it is much more complex. Keeping everything cohesive, manageable and accessible to teams requires a more robust approach. There are several project management applications that have evolved that do a great job helping you with this process. Monday.com ClickUp.com and Asana.com are 3 of our favourites. If you do a quick search, you can find many others to suit your needs and budget.

3. Position & differentiate from your competitors

Perception is everything. How your brand is perceived and how you position your brand can affect how your competitors are perceived in your target market. Positioning differentiates your brand from the others.

It’s not necessary to make your competitors look bad. In fact, that rarely works anymore. It’s better to go high and point out the outstanding benefits of your products or services. Try not to go the path of a lower price point because that can lead to race to the bottom. Most companies can’t win on price if they are competing with any big retailers.

Did you know that Costco breaks even on many products? They can do this because they have the membership fees that make up the core of Costco’s profits. It’s a brilliant business model and impossible to beat on price. You can beat them on customer experience though.

Find a way to win. I know I wouldn’t go to Costco and stand in that line to get like one chicken. Find the weaknesses of your competitors and make yours better. Position your brand by consistently communicating your differentiating qualities on your website, social media and all your marketing communications.

Develop strong visuals, taglines and other marketing assets to communicate your positioning so that it becomes recognizable and memorable.

Be consistent with your brand messaging so that it becomes undeniable. Own that positioning.

Using Costco again as an example, let’s look a Trader Joe’s. They positioned themselves as a “national chain of neighborhood grocery stores.” They offer an intimate corner store type of shopping experience that is a completely different experience than going to Costco. The prices are not as cheap but it’s a successful chain of grocery stores because of how they positioned themselves.

4. Set your goals

To guide your marketing efforts and provide benchmarks for evaluation, you need clearly defined marketing objectives. Once you set your goals, there’s only one thing left to do: implement your strategy.

Use SMART Goals to set your marketing objectives.

Your marketing objectives should align with the widely-used SMART criteria.

What Does the SMART Acronym Stand For?

The acronym stands for:
S — Specific
M — Measurable
A — Achievable
R — Relevant
T — Time-Bound

Specific — Clearly stating the desired outcome. This will answer who, what, when, how much etc.
Measurable — Track progress with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Achievable — Be bold but realistic; use current growth as your benchmark.
Relevant — Align you objective with your overall marketing and business strategy
Time-Bound — Set a specific time frame for achieving your goal.

What is an example of a Smart Goal?
Examples of good SMART goals would be:

Increase sales revenue by 10% in the next quarter by promoting our newest product line using Facebook ads.
OR
Increase conversions on our Product landing page by 10 percent by A/B testing on four conversion-focused elements.

Here’s an in-depth guide on how to set SMART Goals.

There is so much to learn about marketing strategy and know that within your strategy there will be many tactics involved that also require expertise and each of those can take a great deal of testing.

You will need to revisit and adjust your strategy along the way as there are market dynamics involved. Your competitors will continue to adapt and new competitors can suddenly appear. Stay aware of the competition and adapt your tactics as needed but stay focused on your objectives.

The key takeaway here is that building your brand is proven to be the primary driver of long-term growth and success.

Useful Resources

qlutch.com — Excellent templates for Marketing Projects. Free to use online, only pay if you want to download them.

Marketing Sherpa — Review case studies to inspire some ideas. Incredible marketing resources , free templates and more.

Read the full article originally published at Oceanone Design