What­ev­er hur­dle a busi­ness may need to over­come and what­ev­er suc­cess­es it may strive to achieve, mar­ket­ing is a pow­er­ful and mul­ti-faceted tool that can be relied upon.

Whether you want to increase your web­site’s organ­ic search traf­fic, over­come rep­u­ta­tion­al brand dam­age, or encour­age cus­tomers to return, you can use mar­ket­ing in some way.

You may choose to utilise the far-reach­ing dis­ci­pline of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing or take the route of tra­di­tion­al mar­ket­ing to reach your audi­ence. Regard­less, your busi­ness’s goals can be reached with the help of a new strategy.

As long as you begin with con­crete objec­tives and lay detailed foun­da­tions, your mar­ket­ing efforts can succeed.

So, let’s dive into how you can cre­ate a mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy that not only aligns with your busi­ness’s goals but achieves them:

Understanding your business goals

It’s essen­tial that any new cam­paign or strat­e­gy begins with clear­ly out­lined goals. So, before you begin plan­ning your new mar­ket­ing efforts, you’ll need to clar­i­fy your objec­tives. For example:

A busi­ness own­er has the vague idea that they’d like to increase revenue.

They’ll need to con­firm which parts of the busi­ness are underperforming:

• Are they get­ting lots of first-time cus­tomers, but none are returning?
• Or are they fail­ing to attract new cus­tomers completely?

These are the sorts of ques­tions and clar­i­fi­ca­tions that need to be used to refine a busi­ness objec­tive. In our exam­ple, the busi­ness own­er set­tles on:

I want to boost rev­enue by attract­ing new customers.

Once this objec­tive has been clar­i­fied, our exam­ple busi­ness own­er can move on to the next stage:

Define your marketing objective

Next up, we get more spe­cif­ic. This is when you turn an over­all end goal into an action­able and mea­sur­able mar­ket­ing objec­tive. We rec­om­mend using the SMART acronym to stay on task. These let­ters stand for the following:

S – specific

M – measurable

A – achievable

R – relevant

T – time-bound

It’s cru­cial that your objec­tives have these qual­i­ties. If they don’t, they may be too unre­al­is­tic, vague, untrace­able, or unhelpful.

Exam­ples that meet the SMART cri­te­ria include:

I want to increase organ­ic web­site traf­fic by 15% with­in 6 months.

This can be mea­sured by track­ing the num­ber of organ­ic site vis­i­tors in Google Ana­lyt­ics. It’s achiev­able if the busi­ness has the bud­get to imple­ment SEO best prac­tices, cre­ate high-qual­i­ty con­tent, and engage in con­tent pro­mo­tion. And final­ly, this objec­tive is rel­e­vant if the busi­ness needs bet­ter brand vis­i­bil­i­ty or a high­er con­ver­sion rate.

I want to grow my email sub­scriber list by 1,000 new sub­scribers in 3 months.

This can be mon­i­tored using an email mar­ket­ing soft­ware and is achiev­able if the busi­ness is able to offer a valu­able lead mag­net. It’s rel­e­vant because a larg­er mail­ing list can lead to more oppor­tu­ni­ties for engage­ment, sales, and cus­tomer reten­tion. How­ev­er, the busi­ness must have rea­son to believe a larg­er mail­ing list will pro­vide these results (i.e., if it’s already suc­cess­ful­ly con­vert­ing its cur­rent subscribers).

I want to increase the aver­age engage­ment rate on Insta­gram posts by 5% in 4 months.

This objec­tive can be mea­sured by track­ing engage­ment rate with Insta­gram Insights. It’s like­ly to be achiev­able if the busi­ness can post more UGC, run inter­ac­tive polls, and col­lab­o­rate with influ­encers to boost engage­ment. It’s a rel­e­vant goal as high­er engage­ment rates can improve brand loy­al­ty and increase the organ­ic reach of posts. How­ev­er, the busi­ness’s tar­get audi­ence must be reg­u­lar users of social media.

As you can see, mar­ket­ing objec­tives should be kept sim­ple. Our exam­ple busi­ness own­er may come up with some­thing like this:

I want to gain 200 new cus­tomers in 6 months. I can mon­i­tor this with my CRM and Google Ana­lyt­ics. This objec­tive is rel­e­vant because my busi­ness is good at retain­ing exist­ing cus­tomers but will ben­e­fit from 200 new ones. It’s an achiev­able goal because my busi­ness sells on-trend skin­care prod­ucts at mid­dle-range prices, and I can afford to offer a first-pur­chase 20% dis­count and run a social media campaign.

Once you can fill out every let­ter of the SMART cri­te­ria, it’s time to move on to the next stage:

Who are your target audience?

Next, it’s cru­cial that you know and under­stand your tar­get audi­ence. Not only is it essen­tial when defin­ing your busi­ness goals, but you’ll also use this infor­ma­tion when you use audi­ence tar­get­ing tools and start craft­ing mar­ket­ing mes­sag­ing toward cer­tain demographics.

You can under­stand your tar­get audi­ence in sev­er­al ways:

• Use Google Ana­lyt­ics to bet­ter under­stand site vis­i­tors’ behav­iours, pref­er­ences, and demographics.
• Study your com­peti­tors’ audi­ences to iden­ti­fy poten­tial sim­i­lar­i­ties, dif­fer­ences, and opportunities.
• Use built-in audi­ence insights tools on the social media plat­forms you already use to gath­er infor­ma­tion about engage­ment pat­terns and audi­ence interests.
• Cre­ate a Buy­er Per­sona to bet­ter under­stand your audi­ence’s moti­va­tions, needs, and characteristics.

After doing the above research, our exam­ple busi­ness own­er comes to the fol­low­ing conclusion:

My tar­get audi­ence is women between the ages of 18 and 35. They live all over the UK but espe­cial­ly in cities. They’re will­ing to pay mid­dle-range prices for high-qual­i­ty skin­care, espe­cial­ly if the ingre­di­ents are trend­ing on social media. They’re moti­vat­ed by skin­care influ­encers, der­ma­to­log­i­cal con­tent, and the desire to pro­tect their skin from envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors. My audi­ence will save skin­care con­tent online and find val­ue in it, espe­cial­ly if it’s educational.

And now, they can move on to the next phase:

Choose the right marketing channel

There are count­less chan­nels you could choose for your mar­ket­ing cam­paign. Here are just sev­er­al ways you could launch your new strategy:

• Social media
• Email mar­ket­ing
• Blog posts
• Guest posts
• Paid adver­tis­ing
• Affil­i­ate marketing
• Influ­encer marketing
• Video
• Back­link outreach
• Radio adver­tis­ing
• Out­door adver­tis­ing (e.g., bill­boards, tran­sit ads)
• Spon­sor­ships and partnerships
• Direct mail
• SMS
• Tele­vi­sion advertising
• Webi­na­rs
• Native adver­tis­ing
• Pod­casts
• Trade shows and events
• Refer-a-friend schemes
• Press releas­es

Clear­ly, you’re spoiled for choice.

It’s cru­cial that you pick the right mar­ket­ing chan­nel for your busi­ness. This process should­n’t be daunt­ing, though. Once you’ve done the research into your tar­get audi­ence and refined your mar­ket­ing objec­tives, the right chan­nels should be obvious.

For instance, our exam­ple busi­ness own­er is like­ly to pick the following:

I’m going to launch a social media cam­paign with videos and graph­ics to edu­cate and enter­tain plat­form users. I’ll also col­lab­o­rate with skin­care influ­encers to pro­mote my prod­ucts to a larg­er audience.

Create your marketing materials

Once you know how you’re going to deliv­er your new mar­ket­ing cam­paign, it’s time to cre­ate your mes­sage. Whether tex­tu­al or visu­al, your mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als will need to be craft­ed with your tar­get audi­ence and mar­ket­ing objec­tives in mind.

The fol­low­ing are some of the mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als you may need to cre­ate and top tips:

Long-form content

• When cre­at­ing long-form con­tent, you may need to hire a con­tent writer or SEO spe­cial­ist if you need extra help.
• Use tools like SEM­rush or Ahrefs for com­pre­hen­sive key­word research, as this will sup­port your site’s SEO performance.
• Ensure con­tent is well-researched, orig­i­nal, and pro­vides val­ue to the read­er. These qual­i­ties are fun­da­men­tal to SEO best practice.
• Incor­po­rate inter­nal and exter­nal links to rep­utable sources. You may like to do some back­link out­reach, if you have the bud­get, to sup­port your site’s authority.

Short form content

• Whether it’s social media cap­tions, paid ads, email copy, or SMS, you might need to hire a copy­writer or social media man­ag­er for extra help.
• Ensure your mes­sag­ing is con­cise and clear.
• Don’t for­get to use a con­sis­tent brand voice across all the dif­fer­ent plat­forms you use to engage with customers.
• You may want to A/B test dif­fer­ent copy vari­a­tions to see what res­onates best with your audience.

Video content

• If you’re new to cre­at­ing video con­tent, you may need to hire a video­g­ra­ph­er, video edi­tor, or scriptwriter to ensure your work is com­plet­ed to a high quality.
• Make sure the equip­ment you buy or rent (cam­era, micro­phone, light­ing equip­ment, edit­ing soft­ware) is of a high standard.
• Plan your video con­tent thor­ough­ly with a clear storyboard.
• Ensure your videos have good light­ing and sound qual­i­ty, as these can deter view­ers instantly.
• Keep your videos engag­ing with visu­als, music, trend­ing sounds, ani­ma­tions, or B‑roll footage.

Photography and graphics

• If you need some help with this kind of con­tent, you may want to hire a pho­tog­ra­ph­er or graph­ic designer.
• Make sure you use a high-res­o­lu­tion cam­era and reli­able graph­ic design soft­ware (e.g., Adobe Cre­ative Suite).
• It’s rec­om­mend­ed that you use con­sis­tent brand­ing across all your con­tent, includ­ing a colour scheme.
• Opti­mise your images for web to ensure fast load­ing times.
• When pos­si­ble, use orig­i­nal images over stock pho­tos to fos­ter authen­tic and trust­wor­thy branding.

Audio content

• When embark­ing on cre­at­ing audio con­tent for the first time, you may need to hire a sound engi­neer or expe­ri­enced voice-over artist to ensure high standards.
• Like­wise, hav­ing a high-qual­i­ty micro­phone, a sound­proof room, and audio edit­ing soft­ware is essen­tial to cre­at­ing excel­lent audio content.
• Do your best to ensure sound qual­i­ty is crisp and clear.
• You may like to edit out any unnec­es­sary paus­es or back­ground noises.

Offers

• When writ­ing and design­ing attrac­tive deals and offers, you might ben­e­fit from the help of a mar­ket­ing strate­gist or graph­ic designer.
• Offers should be time-sen­si­tive to cre­ate a sense of urgency in leads.
• The val­ue and ben­e­fits of the offer should be com­mu­ni­cat­ed clearly.
• Visu­als can real­ly make offers stand out. So, make these compelling.

Leaflets

• To get pro­fes­sion­al help with leaflets, you might need to hire a graph­ic design­er or copywriter.
• Using a high-qual­i­ty print­ing ser­vice is cru­cial if you want your leaflets to look professional.
• Sim­i­lar­ly, you’ll need to use high-qual­i­ty paper and print­ing techniques.
• Ensure your call to action is clear and that your lead mag­net is attrac­tive (if you’re using one).
• Keep the design of your leaflet clean and unclut­tered, so your mes­sage can be under­stood instantly.

Webinars

• To get help with cre­at­ing a webi­nar for the first time, you may need to hire a con­tent expert or video producer.
• Again, good equip­ment is cru­cial, e.g., web­cam, micro­phone, and webi­nar software.
• Make sure you pro­mote your webi­nar well in advance.
• If your webi­nar is live, engage the audi­ence with a Q&A session.

Backlink or guest post proposals

• If you haven’t done back­link out­reach before, you may need to hire an SEO spe­cial­ist to help. Plus, an expe­ri­enced con­tent writer can ensure your guest post is of the high­est standard.
• Your out­reach pro­pos­al emails should be per­son­alised, show­case the val­ue you can pro­vide, and tar­get rel­e­vant web­sites in your industry.

General tips for creating marketing materials

• Con­sis­ten­cy is real­ly impor­tant. Make sure all your mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als main­tain brand con­sis­ten­cy in terms of colours, fonts, tone, and messaging.
• Before final­is­ing any mate­r­i­al, get feed­back from peers, col­leagues, or a focus group of customers.
• Look into colour the­o­ry when design­ing emails, leaflets, calls-to-action, or social media posts. Out­side of your brand colours, colour can be cru­cial in sway­ing the feel­ings of poten­tial customers.

Start implementing your marketing strategy!

With the plan­ning and cre­at­ing out of the way, it’s time to imple­ment your new strat­e­gy. Here are our rec­om­men­da­tions for this stage:

1. Set a timeline

Dead­lines are impor­tant, so it’s cru­cial that you set clear start and end dates for campaigns.

You might want to break down the cam­paign into small­er tasks and set mile­stones to track progress. If you plan to cre­ate a cam­paign made up of sev­er­al parts, make sure you cre­ate a cal­en­dar to keep things on time.

2. Allocate your budget and resources

Esti­mate the cost of your strat­e­gy. How much will you bid for pay-per-click ads? How much will it cost to design all the social media graph­ics for your cam­paign? How much will you pay for radio or tele­vi­sion ads?

If you can­not reach a def­i­nite fixed cost for your strat­e­gy, you’ll need to mon­i­tor your spend­ing over time. It’s cru­cial that you track and allo­cate expens­es in a way that ensures you stay with­in budget.

You’ll also need to define the roles and respon­si­bil­i­ties of each involved team mem­ber. That way, things can run smooth­ly from the begin­ning. Don’t for­get to iden­ti­fy the tools and plat­forms that will be used (e.g., email mar­ket­ing soft­ware or social media sched­ul­ing tools). These will also need to be fac­tored into your cost forecast.

3. Integrate your strategy across different channels

Though you may intend to launch your mar­ket­ing cam­paign on one sin­gle chan­nel, e.g., Insta­gram, it often helps to pro­mote your efforts with anoth­er chan­nel, e.g., email mar­ket­ing. So, make a plan for how you’ll use dif­fer­ent chan­nels to sup­port and ampli­fy your mes­sage, e.g., send­ing an email after pub­lish­ing a social media post.

Remem­ber, if you’re going to do this, your mes­sag­ing should be con­sis­tent across all channels.

4. Conduct quality assurance tests

Before launch­ing your cam­paign, you should send test emails, pre­view social media posts, or run pilot ads. That way, you can iron out any issues before your launch date.

5. Create a contingency plan

Every cam­paign runs into bumps in the road. That’s why it’s so impor­tant to do a risk assess­ment before you launch, dis­cuss any poten­tial chal­lenges that may arise, and cre­ate back­up plans for each eventuality.

6. Launch your campaign

You may opt for a soft launch rather than a full launch if you pre­fer to start with a small­er audi­ence and gath­er their ini­tial feed­back. On the oth­er hand, you might want to be as loud as pos­si­ble from the start. If so, con­sid­er bol­ster­ing your cam­paign with a press release or local radio shout-out to get the ball rolling.

Make sure you mon­i­tor your cam­paign in real-time dur­ing its launch to address any issues immediately.

Monitor and maintain your strategy’s performance

If you want your new cam­paign to remain on track to achieve your mar­ket­ing objec­tives, you’ll need to mea­sure its per­for­mance. This is cru­cial because you may need to adjust your cam­paign or expand your objec­tive to encom­pass an unprece­dent­ed hiccup.

Plus, how are you going to know when you’ve achieved your goal?

When it comes to mea­sur­ing your strat­e­gy’s per­for­mance, you’ll need to keep an eye on a hand­ful of key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors (KPIs). The KPIs you mon­i­tor will depend on your objec­tive, but they could be some of the following:

• Con­ver­sion rate
• Engage­ment rate
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Bounce rate
• Cost per acqui­si­tion (CPA)
• Return on invest­ment (ROI)
• Cus­tomer life­time val­ue (CLV)
• Aver­age order val­ue (AOV)
• Net pro­mot­er score (NPS)
• Web­site traf­fic (from dif­fer­ent sources)
• Page views
• Time on page
• Cost per click (CPC)
• Open rate (for emails)
• Unsub­scribe rate
• Social media followers/shares/likes
• Cart aban­don­ment rate
• Cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion score
• Gross mar­gin

To get a bet­ter under­stand­ing of mar­ket­ing KPIs for e‑commerce, check out this arti­cle, which goes into more depth.

When look­ing at your dataset, try to go beyond those ini­tial num­bers. For exam­ple, seg­ment it by audi­ence and analyse how dif­fer­ent groups inter­act with your cam­paigns. You might find that younger users engage more with video con­tent, while old­er users pre­fer detailed articles.

By under­stand­ing these nuances, you can tai­lor your mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als to bet­ter cater to spe­cif­ic audi­ence seg­ments, lead­ing to improved over­all per­for­mance. Addi­tion­al­ly, you may want to alter your orig­i­nal objec­tives in light of the infor­ma­tion you discover.