Whenever we start working with a new business at Kilchurn Marketing – and at least once a year with our existing clients – we do one very important thing. We work with them to create a marketing strategy. That’s because the importance of a marketing strategy really can’t be understated when it comes to planning, executing and measuring the success of your efforts. In this blog we’ll aim to share all the reasons why the time you spend creating a strategy for your marketing efforts is never time wasted.
You’ll nail your USP and value proposition…
The first step to creating a marketing strategy is always identifying your unique selling points (USP) and your value proposition. Your USP is quite clear – what makes your offering unique. Is it the way you make your products? Your experience and expertise? A value proposition is a headline, sub header and short statement that explain clearly what your brand does and how it offers value to your customers. Sitting down to write one means that you’ll identify what makes your brand memorable and why it’s important to your customers, teasing out the key elements of your marketing strategy.
…And you’ll get your targeting right too!
Another foundation of your strategy must be your customers, your target market. These are your current customers and the people that you want to convert into your customers. You’ll not only identify your target market but segment them (perhaps into customer personas) and understand their needs, preferences and behaviour at different stages of the awareness funnel. This work will help you to optimise and tailor your marketing efforts so that you reach the right people with the right message at the right time. This leads us on to our next point – marketing channels.
It balances your efforts over all the relevant channels
Once you know who your customers are, what their needs are and where they hang out, that can inform the channels you use to reach them. The channels you choose will vary depending on your industry, customer demographics and awareness stages. For example, younger audiences (but increasingly older people too) will be more likely to be on TikTok, someone who’s a loyal customer can be reached via your email list, and in high end sectors, luxury print PR is still king!
Business to business comms on LinkedIn are thriving again, so look at the whole picture and then narrow down the options based on your customers.
You ensure you include both customer acquisition and retention
A great marketing strategy will help you attract and convert new customers, but it should also reward loyalty and serve your existing clients. When you create your strategy remember to think about where someone is in their awareness cycle – have they just found your brand, maybe they’ve been checking you out for a while or perhaps they’ve already purchased from you. What can you do and say that helps all those people buy your products or services – or, of course, buy from you again!
You can track success and failure
A marketing strategy needs to include goals and KPIs along the way. For example, do you want to grow your audience on social media by 20%? Break that down into numbers and timescales, i.e. you need to add 120 new followers a month for six months. What action will you take each week during those six months to drive that growth? Competitions, reels, lives and structured posting? If you’re aiming to boost website traffic by 33% over a year using SEO, make a plan that gives you clear action to take each week.
For example, one week in a month you will write two blogs and upload them. The next week you will spend two hours working on backlinks, the next reviewing the existing page content and making improvements. Then, the final week of the month you spend addressing user experience and making changes to make the site easier to use. When you put numbers and timescales at the heart of marketing, you can see what’s working and what’s not when it comes to money and time invested. That’s much more effective than simply throwing mud at the wall and seeing what sticks.
You get a roadmap to follow
Remember: “Good intentions are the seeds of good deeds, but they need to be watered with action and perseverance”. Even if you block out time to work on marketing a couple of times a week, without a strategy your efforts will not deliver a good return on investment. As we mentioned above, your strategy will include monthly tasks broken down by channel and customer segment, so you know exactly how to spend your time dedicated to marketing. However, a marketing strategy must also be flexible and include regular checkpoints, which we explore in our next point.
There’s scope for adaptation and optimisation
Those checkpoints and comparing real time results to your KPIs mean that you can see what’s working and what isn’t. That’s why no marketing strategy should ever be set in stone. You need to be aware when a campaign underperforms or just falls flat and adapt. Every marketer has worked on a campaign that didn’t pan out as expected and the rise of digital media, with ever-changing algorithms and shifts in consumer behaviour, has made this even more relevant. And the opposite is also true! If you’ve allocated a budget to SEO or paid ads and the results are driving amazing results and boosting sales, you may want to invest more budget in that area.
We hope this overview has helped you see the importance of a marketing strategy and given you some top tips to help you write your own. There are so many benefits to having a clear strategy for all your comms, and it will help make the most of the time and money you invest. If you’d like to talk to the team about done-for-you marketing – including a robust strategy – just drop us a line.