How to Create a Marketing Strategy for Your Business

How to Create a Marketing Strategy for Your Business
Once you’ve got a business up and running, it’s time to start thinking about marketing. Here're some tips on how to create a marketing strategy for your business.
by Kaitlin Keefer Mar 30, 2021 — 9 min read
How to Create a Marketing Strategy for Your Business

Once you’ve got a business up and running, it’s time to start thinking about your marketing plan. You might already have a business plan, but it’s important to dig deeper to understand your audience and target market. You want to reach them with the right messaging that gets your product or service noticed. This is where a marketing strategy comes in.

Why you need a marketing strategy

While a business plan explains your business — who you are, what you do, current and future location planning, growth strategies, staffing, finances, and more, your marketing plan is much more in-depth regarding specific tactics, goals, and outcomes. Here’s why you need a marketing strategy:

  1. Clear guidelines: Your marketing strategy gives you and your employees a clear understanding of your marketing and priorities, what you are focusing on, and your tactics to achieve your goals.
  2. Deeper insights: With the right research, planning, and execution, you can glean powerful insights that help you better understand your customers.
  3. Better budgeting: A marketing plan helps you prioritise your budget, allocate the right amount needed to execute, or better understand what you would need.
  4. Competitive edge: Getting ahead with competitors is difficult, but having a well-thought-out marketing strategy helps you stay top of mind with customers.
  5. Quicker growth: Setting goals and outlining how you plan to achieve them is the best way to grow your business.

Before you get started

To create an actionable marketing strategy that will drive results for your business, you need to come prepared. Before you start drafting, gather the following information and materials to reference as you write.

Examples of different types of marketing

SWOT analysis

The first step of building out your marketing strategy is to do a SWOT analysis. A SWOT analysis helps you identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that your business faces. By examining all potential internal or external factors, you can create strategies that make the most of your advantages, while addressing any challenges.

This kind of analysis can give you a clear picture of where you are in relation to competitors in your industry, and the answers can help form the basis of a new strategy to maximise profits, boost sales, and understand your unique selling proposition (USP) so you can create a killer marketing strategy. It’s especially helpful prior to conducting market research to help you identify what areas you should focus your time and money on.

A SWOT matrix is an easy-to-use tool that can. And remember, you don’t have to have all of the solutions already figured out (that comes later), but you’ll have a better understanding of where you stand and where you need to focus your attention when building out your marketing strategy.

Internal factors

Strengths

Your strengths are the things that your business is already doing well when it comes to product offerings and your marketing strategy. Ask yourself questions like:

Weaknesses

Weaknesses in a SWOT analysis refer to internal things that might be hindering your business, like a weak marketing plan or minimal online presence. To identify your weaknesses, as yourself questions like:

External factors

Opportunities

Opportunities are external factors that can provide an opportunity for you — look at your internal strengths and weaknesses for ideas. Here are some questions to ask when analysing opportunities:

Threats

Threats in the SWOT analysis are external issues that can create weaknesses in your business — they can also be turned into opportunities. Here are some questions to ask when analysing threats:

Doing a SWOT analysis before kicking off audience and market research will help you be prepared with an in-depth knowledge of where your business stands as it is and what areas you want to focus on building out in your marketing strategy.

Target market analysis

It might be tempting to try to market to everyone, but casting a wide net can work against you by annoying customers who aren’t interested at all, burning through your marketing budget, and likely missing the opportunity to attract high-quality return customers who value and trust your business. These are the best customers to grow your business.

You might feel like you know who your customer is, but it’s important to properly identify who they are based on an in-depth review of your products and services, the marketplace, your potential (or current) customers, and more.

Buyer persona

Before diving into researching your marketing, start by creating buyer personas for your audience. A buyer persona is a fictional, general representation of who your ideal customer is. Depending on your company and product offering, you might have more than just one buyer persona.

Key characteristics that make up a buyer persona are:

This persona should be a guideline when you start doing research to help you effectively reach members of your audience.

Market research

Market analysis is the process of gathering information about your business’s buyer personas, target audience, and current customers to understand how your product or service fits the current market, how viable it will be, and if it will be successful. A market analysis tells you:
Where and how your target audience and customers find new products and services.

There are two types of market research: primary and secondary. Both help your business gather actionable information, but one may suit your specific needs more than the other.

Primary market research

Primary market research is research that you conduct yourself or with the help of someone you hire or bring on staff to do. Primary research typically involves going straight to your source. This includes anecdotal information gathered through:

Through primary market research, you’re aiming to gather two types of information that are complementary to each other:

  1. Exploratory: This type of information is open-ended and general. It’s typically gathered through long interviews with a small group of people or one person at a time.
  2. Specific: This type of information is very pointed and precise. You reference this information to solve a problem or issue presented from your exploratory research. This utilises more formal interviews to gather.

Primary research can take much longer and cost a lot more than secondary research, but it often yields more actionable and conclusive results.

Secondary market research

Secondary research is easier to come by. It has often already been compiled, analysed, and published by someone else. Secondary research can include, but is not limited to:

Secondary research is much more accessible and cost-effective than primary research. It’s a better option if you have a limited budget or already have a good idea of your target market.

Once you understand your target customer and market, you should make this the foundation of your marketing strategy. You can use this information to develop attainable marketing goals and objectives, and fine-tune your product messaging so that it resonates with your customers.

Marketing goals and objectives

A plan means nothing if you aren’t working toward a goal. Your marketing goals are your North Star of what you want to achieve with your marketing strategy. Just as important as your goals is your plan for how to achieve them. This is where your marketing objectives come in. These objectives identify specific actions that you are going to take to achieve your goals. Objectives should include measurement that allows you to evaluate the success of your marketing strategy quarterly and yearly. And remember to reference your market research and SWOT analysis for what goals and objectives to prioritise.

Outlining SMART goals and objectives

Believe it or not, the way you approach and draft your goals and objectives can have an impact on the success of your strategy. The SMART goal method is helpful in writing out actionable and attainable goals that will help your business grow.

Examples of goals and objectives

Goal: Increase customer loyalty
Objective: Enroll at least five customers a day into your loyalty program.

Goal: Target new customers
Objective: Allocate 15% of marketing budget per quarter to social media ads to increase reach and acquire new customers.

Goal: Launch a newsletter
Objective: Send a monthly newsletter with a 10% increase in new subscribers month-over-month.

For some goals, you might have more than one objective. For example:

Goal: Grow Instagram presence.
Objective 1: Have a positive week-over-week follower count.
Objective 2: Have positive engagement growth week-over-week.
Objective 3: Post on Instagram feed two to three times a week.
Objective 4: Post on Instagram stories two times a day.

Through your market research you might learn that you are reaching different buyer personas through different channels, so avoid creating the same objectives for growing each marketing channel.

Determine KPIs for precise measurement

Outlining your goals and objectives is one thing, but knowing the right way to measure them is just as important. As mentioned, setting relevant key performance indicators and benchmarks on your goals is instrumental in achieving them. Examples of KPIs are:

By assigning the right KPIs to your goals and objectives, you’ll be able to gather valuable insights into your customers’ browsing and shopping habits, which will help you fine-tune your marketing strategy over time and grow your business even more.

Building off of your strategy

The work doesn’t end once your strategy is completed — in fact, it’s just getting started. As you start reaching goals and hitting key objectives, it’s important to keep thinking about ways to expand your marketing strategy. As your company grows and your product offering advances, think about developing omnichannel marketing strategies and continue to expand your knowledge on how to market your business.

Kaitlin Keefer
Kaitlin Keefer is a content strategist at Square who has covered how businesses connect with their customers and ways they can leverage tools and data to become industry leaders.

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