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How to write a great marketing strategy

marketing strategy blog 3

Written by Trio Media

Have you been asked to produce a marketing strategy for the first time? Or does the responsibility of making a marketing strategy sit with you, but would you like to find the best way to structure it?

In this blog, our CEO, Claire Daniels, who specialises in marketing strategy, shares her top tips for writing a great strategy.

Over the past decade of my career, I have been producing marketing strategies within both in-house roles and for our clients at Trio. I have found myself returning to tried-and-tested methods and models time and time again, so I thought I would share my top tips with you.

Before you begin

The first two key things to understand are that a marketing strategy should plot out where you are now and where you want to go. The latter is essentially your strategy and will detail how you will get there.

But you can’t successfully start that work without understanding the circumstances that led to where you are today. You need to know what’s worked, what hasn’t and what you can learn from incorporating it into your strategy. Finding this out will be part of your first phase: Research.

Jump to:

Step one: Research

Your research phase may include any of the following that’s relevant to you:

Audience insights

What is your customer’s profile? What motivates them? What are their key demographics? What are their key buying behaviours? You can use industry tools, such as GWI, to gather this data.

You can also garner much of this information from your CRM and analytics tools, e.g., social media followers and website visitors.

Competitor insights

Some questions you should ask yourself:

  • Who are your key competitors?
  • Why are they your competitors?
  • What do they do better than you?
  • Where do you have a competitive advantage over them?
  • What is their pricing strategy?

Understanding the competitive landscape is critical to uncovering how your customers see you in a sea of other providers.

Performance review

Track your performance using CRM data, Google Analytics, any other sales data and marketing reference touchpoints such as email, search, paid media and social media. Once you have it all collected, review what works and what doesn’t.

You should be reviewing metrics like cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS), return on investment (ROI), lifetime value (LTV) and any other metrics that are valuable to your business.

Market analysis

I would use this to look at more macroeconomic factors. For example, you could use the PESTLE framework to analyse any changes in the market that have affected your business positively or negatively.

As a reminder, PESTLE stands for Political, Economical, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental. A good example is how changes in government legislation, COVID-19, the cost-of-living crisis, etc., have affected your market.

Situational analysis

You should also examine your performance more inwardly, conducting a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats).

You could also try our Top 20 Reasons™ exercise, whereby you evaluate:

  • 5 reasons people buy from you
  • 5 reasons people don’t buy
  • 5 reasons people come back
  • 5 reasons people don’t come back

Our exercise helps us examine how customers see you rather than how you see yourself to get an accurate picture of what’s working.

Summarise your findings

Once you have completed your research, summarise your key findings and allow yourself to start to come to some conclusions about what this data means and how you may apply it to your strategy.

Another useful model at this stage is SOSTAC. SOSTAC provides a structure for organising a strategy that includes Situation (the research we have done above), Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Action and Control.

Step two: Structure

As we start to structure our marketing strategy, we need to consider what we want to achieve and what will be required to achieve it.

I recommend a solid structure for this second part that any marketer can follow to shape their marketing strategy. There are some optional extras you can throw in, too, depending on where you are in your marketing journey.

1. Objectives

You must set objectives in your marketing strategy. I recommend 3-5 objectives, which should follow the SMART objectives framework in that they should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.

Anything that cannot meet these five metrics is more likely part of your vision and mission and is aspirational but not an actual objective. It is also essential to ensure your marketing objectives do not act in isolation and are aligned with the overall company’s goals.

For example, if the company’s objective is to achieve a £1 million uplift in sales within the next 12 months, I would look at how much of that is from new business vs existing clients. And for new business, how many leads does marketing contribute to the pipeline? Start looking back at the conversion rate and average order value to understand how many additional leads will need to be generated by marketing activities to contribute to the company objective.

This also helps to give you a very clear understanding of your strategy, considering which channels perform best from a lead generation perspective and how much of the budget will need to be spent to ensure that uplift.

You may also consider objectives around lead nurturing, client retention, brand awareness, membership engagement, news coverage and employee satisfaction, depending on the key touch points of marketing within your organisation.

2. Positioning and messaging

I always like to include some content around positioning and messaging in a strategy for new clients. We rarely find clients who have all this covered in their brand guidelines, and after the research stage, we often find that a realignment on key messaging is needed.

For example, we worked with an organisation that provides consumers with a tech solution to manage car admin, like MOTs, car servicing, car insurance, etc. However, we found during the research stage that there is generally a lot of mistrust in the car garage industry.

Therefore, we made trust one of the critical pillars of their messaging and identified a strong need for thought leadership content to build authority in a sector where there is little.

A couple of the exercises we do here include:

  • An adapted version of Gartner’s product positioning framework (Contact us for a copy of this!)
  • A value proposition map where we look at product fit vs market fit
  • Creation of key messaging and content pillars to meet the demands of your target audience

3. Strategy

Now comes the big chunk of the work: what we will do to achieve our objectives.

I like to use the AIDA model, which stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. This framework allows you to consider the different stages of the buyer journey and how your activities might change throughout this process.

For example, at the awareness stage, activities like PR, advertising, etc, will be required, but at the desire stage, you will need more case studies and testimonials to drive a conversion. Considering all these elements and focusing on more than just one area of the funnel is essential. Your objectives will help you understand all the areas of the buyer journey you will be touching.

Using AIDA, I map out all the different marketing touch points, including (but not limited to):

The previous research and work will allow you to quickly determine which tools should be used and when. You may also have identified through your research that some areas you invested in don’t work, so they will not form part of your strategy going forward.

Returning to the SOSTAC framework, this strategy piece will encapsulate Strategy, Tactics and Action. Detailing exactly what you will do, when, and using which channels.

4. Measurement

With the above in place, you can think about how to measure outcomes. I like plotting out a timeline of key projects or activities and when they will happen. I will also examine how each activity and marketing channel will be measured for effectiveness and linked back to key objectives.

Using OKRs is a great way to measure results. OKRs stands for Objectives & Key Results, which means that for each of your objectives set out in your strategy, you can align several key results to them, which act as milestones towards achieving the goals.

Consider here what platforms you will use to collect the data needed to measure and how you will report this back to key stakeholders. Arguably, the measurement part is the most important, as, without a strategy to measure success, it is hard to know if success has been achieved, rendering the marketing strategy useless.

The production of a marketing strategy is one of the most influential and rewarding things you can do as a marketer. For a department that is often considered ‘the colouring in department’, a marketing strategy shows how many areas of the business marketing touch and how dependent it is on achieving business objectives.

We have helped many clients who are either at the start-up or scale-up stages of their business and haven’t been able to see how they progress forward. For many, we have helped define their complete proposition, what products or services they should or shouldn’t sell, what their pricing should be and what their routes to market are.

Need help with your marketing strategy?

If you’re just getting started with your marketing strategy, or you might need some support from a marketing strategy agency like Trio, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

We have referenced several tools and frameworks that are not publicly available. If you would like access to anything referenced in this blog, please contact us.