7-Steps to Build Your Marketing Strategy

Ok. You've got big goals for your startup, or small business. The business has been growing at a good pace for the past two years. Your venture capital pitches finally got through, and you have some more capital, with a target to grow at 50% or 100%. You hacked together a quick plan, but now need to build your marketing strategy - and it has to be solid. But how?

Use the following 7-steps to build yours.

1 - Objectives

Start by articulating what you are setting out to achieve. Set objectives that follow the SMART philosophy (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). What are your business goals, that your marketing plan will ultimately target to achieve?

It is not always easy to do, but be as specific and measurable as you can be. The opening idea of setting a target to grow 50% this year, with the marketing goal being to support this with demand generation programs that will get you there.

2 - Target Market

To create a marketing strategy that is useful, you must know your target audience. If your business has already been operating for a while - go buy your sales staff a whole series of coffees! Ask them to articulate who the potential customers are for your products or services. Ask them what the ideal customer looks like, and what types of customers to avoid. Work out the beginnings of your buyers' personas from these discussions.

Next, speak with as many existing clients as you can muster. Existing customer discussions as a base for first hand market research is irreplaceable. With both an internal view of the customer and direct client discussion, start to sketch out your buyer personas. At this point your understanding of the personas and target market should be solidifying.

Confirm all this with your senior managers and the product team. If there is a decision to veer toward another target market, or new audience - studying the existing conditions will not help you. Aligning with this team will make sure you are veering toward where 'the puck is going' rather than toward where it had been in the past.

3 - Competition and Company Capabilities

Run a competitive audit to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Remember this isn't just a feature to feature comparison. It is about understanding their positioning and messaging in market. Look at their approach to marketing. Is their website sleek, fast, and sexy? Do they blog consistently, host many video webinars or a podcast series, or do they come out with consistent white papers, research, infographics, and other content? Being aware of the standard approach will point you in the right direction for the basics. In the process you may also uncover some gaps in their strategy of which you can take advantage (the white spaces and gaps).

Regarding your material, read too Should you use Gated Content Marketing ... or Ungated?

Look to their social media presence. Where are they using social media? Is it on LinkedIn, and Twitter primarily? Or are they also on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and starting their presence on TikTok?

Don't forget to check the more traditional venues of the big analysts. Reports like the Magic Quadrant (Gartner), Wave (Forrester), or Marketscape (IDC) - are all tremendously useful reports for assessing competitors.

In this regard, don't be shy about reaching out to speak with their clients and former clients. Ask your customer success team if they know of any clients who were previously with a competitor. They may be willing to discuss the competitive solution, services, and their capabilities against your own. This will probably be the most realistic and telling competitive perspective you can find.

4 - Positioning and SWOT

With the information collected review your own company's positioning. Having spoken with clients, it should guide you to understand your strengths, and what specific strengths truly shines in the customers' minds. What sets apart your company and offering as unique? Ultimately, here you are seeking to articulate your unique value proposition (UVP), and how it differs from your competitors.

A helpful tool is to set up a SWOT analysis of your own firm (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats). Mapping this out can make certain marketing tactics and approaches, obvious.

Knowing your key positioning in the market, will also help you articulate the key messaging with which you want to associate your brand.

5 - Channels

Knowing the market, your competitors, and your own positioning - will help define the marketing channels that are important to both garnering brand exposure, and for generating demand. A good competitive analysis shows where your adversaries are marketing their messages. This may be a starting point. Long term, continually seek out and test new opportunities and methods. From time to time you may uncover new avenues that the competitors simply overlooked, or did not find appealing for some reason that suits your niche.

6 - Strategic Approach & Tactics

After doing all this research, now you are quite prepared to build your marketing strategy. Set out the overall course, like deciding that a content marketing approach is your best option for your B2B tech offering. A good marketing strategy will also outline the other aspects and supporting options, like how SEO, SEM, SMM, and email marketing help with the content strategy.

Once you have set out the overall strategy, break the plan down to tactics. These tactics should outline the specific actions that must be taken, and by when - to make the full plan work.

7 - Metrics

With your strategy in place, outline your specific measurable goals, and KPIs (key performance indicators). It is important to outline what you will monitor so that your team knows whether your marketing plan is performing well or not. It is important to outline targets for the same reason. Are you hitting the goals you set out for yourselves from the outset?

Key to this exercise is to be realistic. Are you truly setting targets that are achievable. Every company wants stretch goals and targets. However, if they are far too high, and not achievable, then it will only serve to disenchant your team.

Putting it into Action

Marketing strategies can distinguish the companies that will succeed at capturing an increasing share of the market, and those which do not. It does not require a PhD level education to build your marketing strategy. The important part is to do so diligently. Invest the time to outline what you must do. Use the structure above as your outline. Get a few educated opinions about it, to help adjust and improve it. Then, most importantly - go execute the plan with confidence!