Planning Your Marketing Strategy

marketing

Oct 4

This blog is for creative business owners who want to grow their businesses online. I’ll be sharing blog posts that cover an aspect of digital marketing for creatives, whether you sell products or services. It’s a marketing pep talk if you will.

I’ll be talking about all things SEO, marketing funnels, advertising, email marketing, or mindset around marketing. Each post will encourage and inspire you with actionable tips: sans marketing jargon.

A “strategy” can sound like a complicated thing, something distant and unattainable unless you’re some kind of trained strategist. But, put simply, your strategy is the thing that will take you from where you are now to where you want to be.

In this post, we’ll be covering…

Marketing strategy
The Marketing Mix
Planning your marketing strategy for the year ahead

What is Marketing Strategy?

The words “marketing strategy” get bandied everywhere, but what do they mean?

A strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim. A strategy helps you get to where you want to go. A strategy is the thing that connects your reality to your vision. It’s the step-by-step process of reaching your goals.

I think the phrase can feel a bit jargony when applied in two ways: big picture and piece by piece.

Big Picture

Firstly, marketing strategy is about the big picture: how do we get from where we are now to where we want to be in 5 years? What is the plan or aim, and how can we take action to get there?

Over the last three years, I’ve worked as a freelance C-level marketer for various thought leaders, coaches, and marketing agencies. This has involved a lot of this big-picture strategic thinking where we ask ourselves if all of our actions now align with where we want to be.

Piece-by-Piece

Email, paid ads, and social media all fit into the bit overarching strategy. These are the piece-by-piece strategies and probably the more commonly talked about when you see content on social media. They help us reach a short-to-mid-term goal in one area of our business or make up a part of our bigger overarching goal.

You might have one larger goal for your brand: To turn over £1,000,000 a year, or to impact 10,000 people, or to be in 100 stores nationwide. That’s where your big overarching strategy comes in.

Within that, you’ll be taking regular marketing action, so you might have:

An email marketing strategy to generate 30% of your revenue from your email list.
An SEO strategy to get 30% of your website traffic from organic search.
A paid advertising strategy to help you get to £10,000 a month turnover.

We need to have the big-picture strategy in place to show us where we want to go and how we’ll get there if we want the piece-by-piece strategy to be truly impactful for our brands.

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The Marketing Mix

What’s the recipe for business success? Business leaders and marketing strategists use a set of ingredients to ensure that a business is successful.

It’s a great place to start when we think about marketing strategy. It provides a framework for assessing our business’s readiness for successful marketing and helps us think through what our businesses need to look like to reach our long-term goals.

It’s known as the Marketing Mix.

After being developed in the 60s, it’s evolved from 4 P’s to 7 P’s, sometimes even the 4 C’s - but the foundational principles are the same.

We want to assess and develop our businesses with our ideal customer in mind.

I’m going to talk to you about the 4C’s, a simple model that can be applied to any business size, and give you some prompts so you can think about them in light of your business.

I prefer the Cs because it starts with the customer in mind (which is also where we start with SEO: keyword research! But more on that in another post).

Consumer Wants and Needs

If we start from this point, we don’t end up developing products that nobody will buy. Making products is easy. Making products that sell requires you to understand what your people want.

Cost to Satisfy those needs

The pricing strategy is a whole other kettle of fish, but it needs to be a consideration. We don’t need to be low priced to sell (Seth Godin’s quote: “Low price is the refuge of the marketer with nothing left to offer.”) - but our price point in the market impacts our marketing.

Think of the difference between Primark and Whistles - they sell clothing but at different prices to different people.

Convenience to buy

Where can people buy from you, and what bottlenecks might there be to stop them from purchasing? The internet has increased convenience hugely!

Communication

We don’t want to talk *at* our audience; we want to cultivate a relationship with them. That’s why we look at “engagement” metrics in marketing - we want a response from people. Where can people connect with your brand?

Focusing on communication and engagement will greatly benefit your marketing, as it will build an audience more likely to leave reviews and recommend you to friends.

Here are some questions for you to think about:

What wants or needs are your products and services solving for people? Have people expressed those wants or needs?
What’s your price point in the market? Are you currently on the cheaper end, in the middle, or more on the luxury side?
How do people buy from you? What are the ways people can access your products and services?
How are you communicating with your audience? How are you measuring and encouraging engagement?

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Planning Your Year

Lots of us spend WAY more time on either end of the “big picture vs piece-by-piece” spectrum rather than plotting our way through the middle of it.

Maybe we’re consumed by the now. Things like Brexit & EU VAT, how to ship internationally, disrupted supply chains, home-schooling kids, and juggling life and business.

Occasionally, we dream about our goals and vision: what it will feel like to hit our revenue goal, what life could be like, and what we’d love to do in our businesses.

The problem is that we don’t spend much time in the middle space, thinking about what actions we can take today, tomorrow, next week, and next month that will move us intentionally towards our goals for this year and beyond.

As you’re thinking about what you want your business to achieve this year, think about how you’re going to get there:

If you’re considering increasing your sales, are you increasing your marketing resources?
If you’re thinking about marketing, do you know which channels are the most effective for your business?
Are you putting marketing plans in place that will help you grow? Or are you expecting bigger results from the same amount of effort you put into marketing last year?
Are you being realistic? You can’t do everything. That’s why knowing which marketing channels bring you the highest number of sales is valuable - it saves you time on the platforms that aren’t making you any money.

Once you’ve brainstormed on those bullet points (and others in this post), it’s time to start planning. Set your big goals for the year, and then break them down into each quarter. Planning your marketing for the next 6-12 months. It’s a great way to help you lift your mind out of the daily grind!

It’s Never Too Late

If you’ve read this post thinking that it’s too late in the year or even in your business journey to start doing this, then think again. As the saying goes:

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.

What’s one big goal you will set yourself for the coming year? Let me know in the comments!