As a senior professional , you realise that creating a marketing strategy is a two way exercise. While surveying your organisation's market, you must also undertake a degree of introspection, allowing you to understand what your organisation represents, and where it is going.
In this blog, we examine some sensible steps to get you on your way to create a marketing strategy for your company, and some tips on how to put your plan together.
Get goal setting
Your marketing plan need not be a costly exercise, but you can benefit from devoting a good portion of your time to it. One of the first things you need to ascertain is your overall marketing goals, which can be aligned with the general business objectives of your company. You might base this on meetings with chief executives or board members, as well as discussions with your own marketing team about how you see your brand. Represent a company with its fingers in many pies? You can put together your goals for each arm of your business and draw up a separate plan if this makes sense.
Undergo a SWOT analysis
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Once you have put these together you can ensure that all the activities which comprise your company marketing strategy address at least one of the areas in a positive manner.
Perform a market analysis
Your marketing team can be such a powerful business function, because it can communicate the unique selling points of your company in an engaging manner. Before you can do this, you need to know where you are located in the market currently, what you can offer which is different, and how you want to be positioned in the long term. You can then identify your current and potential competitive advantages by comparing the offerings of rival companies with what you can provide to clients.
Define your budget
Now comes what might be a familiar but unwelcome task to you: defining your budget and using it proportionally within your marketing strategy. It's an approximate figure, but many experts believe that a marketing budget should be allocated around 10 per cent of total revenue.
Building your strategy
Your strategy should be carefully weighted to address all your key objectives while reflecting your priorities. Some of the best integrated marketing strategies are varied and experimental in parts, while not ignoring the most important marketing activities which can contribute to a company's growth and future success. To really get 'up close and personal' with your potential customer base, you can create customer personas which can provide you with much-needed direction when planning activities.
Keep monitoring
Once you create a marketing strategy for your company's marketing strategy it's important to see it as a living organism which will change and evolve over the months. You should leave room for unplanned, reactive activities, and should also record the success of each item, allowing you to enhance your plans for future strategies.
If you have questions about developing a content strategy that drives your desired results for you company then click here to arrange a FREE Content Marketing Assessment.
