
How to Create a Marketing Strategy: Perfecting your Promotional Power
Incredible marketing is 1 part perspiration and 2 parts preparation.
To make the right connections with your audience, you can’t just jump on the latest promotional bandwagon and hope for the best. You need to make sure that you have all the tools and resources you need in place to facilitate success.
You need a #MarketingStrategy.
A marketing strategy is the compass you use to guide the connections you make with your target audience. It’s how you make sure that every penny you spend on advertising, has the right impact for both your brand reputation and your profit margins.
The trouble is, 46% of brands still don’t have a marketing strategy.
If you’re one of those companies sailing without a map, don’t worry. By the time you’ve finished reading, you’ll have everything you need to replace your directionless campaigns with strategic results.

Creating a Marketing Strategy: It All Starts with Research
#Marketing strategies are the parts of your business plan that highlight how you plan to find and attract customers to your company. They outline your promotional goals, your position in the marketplace, and your marketing mix, among other things.
Because your marketing strategy is something that you’ll refer to time and time again as your venture grows, you can’t afford to simply “guess” at what you need to do to connect with your customers. That means before you start writing, you need to know what you’re selling, who you’re selling it to, and the context that you’re operating in.
1. Establish your User Personas
The days of aimless outbound marketing are over. Today, you need to know exactly who you’re connecting with through every social media share and blog post. To get the most ROI out of your marketing strategy, you’ll need user personas.
Your user personas are representations of your ideal customers, intended to help you make decisions like: which marketing techniques should you use, where should you be focusing your attention, and which pain points will you need to address? The more informative your personas are, the more personalised and productive your marketing campaigns will be.
2. Assess the Competition
There’s a reason why that old saying: “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” is so popular. Once you know who you’re going to be selling your product to, you’ll need to figure out who you’ll be competing against for their attention. Competitive analysis should give you an insight into the strengths, and weaknesses of other organisations in your niche.
Analysing the competition will give you inspiration into what kind of marketing techniques work best for your target audience. It should also highlight areas where you can get ahead of the competition by targeting customers they can’t support, or offering services they don’t provide.
3. Perform a SWOT analysis
Finally, once you’re sure that you understand your customers and competitors, it’s time to make sure that you know as much as possible about your own brand. Use your marketing #Strategy as an opportunity to perform a SWOT analysis on your company. Identifying your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats will help you figure out how to position yourself in the current market.
Remember to be brutally honest with your internal assessment and provide yourself with as much data as possible about both your proficiencies and your limitations.

Three Steps for a Stronger Marketing Strategy
Once you’ve successfully finished your homework, you’ll be able to start working on the fun part of the process, refining your strategy. The easiest way to make sure that every #MarketingPlan and strategy goes smoothly is to work with a professional agency.
However, there are a few things you can do to improve your chances of creating a successful strategy. For instance:
1. Refine your Goals
Every marketing strategy needs a strong set of goals. Without targets to achieve, how would you know if your campaigns are making the right impact on your target audience? Using the research, you gathered above, build your goals based on what you know about your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.
Remember, your goals should be attainable, but challenging too. Make sure that you tie your marketing missions in with your overall business targets, then use metrics and milestones to track your success.
2. Know your USP
Look back at your SWOT analysis and focus on the “Strengths” section. What is it that makes your business so compelling? How do you differentiate yourself from the competition? Your USP is the most powerful part of your marketing strategy, as it gives you a way to separate yourself from the other companies in your space.
A strong understanding of your USP will help you to make focused decisions about your future marketing campaigns. For instance, if you offer amazing customer service experiences, it makes sense to focus on earned media campaigns, word of mouth marketing, and referrals.
3. Match your Marketing Techniques to your Brand Identity
Finally, remember that just because new marketing trends emerge every year, doesn’t mean that you have to try all of them. It’s tempting to get carried away with the latest techniques — particularly if other companies in your industry are using them. However, remember that your brand is unique, and your marketing strategy should be too.
When deciding how to market your business, make sure that every choice you make resonates with the brand image you’re trying to create. At the same time, ensure that the identity you build stays consistent across every channel by building brand guidelines into your marketing strategy. For instance:
- Which colours, and logos should you use in your marketing materials?
- What kind of personality and tone of voice should you use?
- How and when do you need to use your logo?

Make the Most of your Marketing Strategy
A marketing strategy is a crucial component in building your brand.
It helps to ensure that you maintain a consistent identity and develop strong relationships with your target audience. However, remember that it’s a guide — not a bible.
As your business evolves, your marketing strategies will naturally change with it. After all, as time passes by, you’ll gather insights from #MarketingTips, learn more about your target audience, and hopefully pick up a few techniques along the way. Use your marketing strategy as a compass to guide your communication efforts but remember to update and enhance it regularly too.
To learn more about creating your marketing strategy, and the different types of strategies business can use, check out our complete guide to simplifying your communication campaign.
Don’t approach promotion unprepared. Make sure you have the strategy to make your brand shine.
