An effective Marketing Strategy is the route map for every companies to move towards their goals and grow steadily. A well thought marketing strategy and the plan helps you to stay focused with your goals, understand the target audience better, and effectively counter the competition. It’s a way to have an efficient and systematic approach for increasing your reach, connecting and attracting your target audience, engaging with them, and driving call to action.

Following these 7 points of marketing strategy will ensure sure-shot results in 2023.

1. Always create strategies for the quarter.

Many companies will create annual marketing plans. But many companies fail at fulfilling those plans. With annual plans, you’ll find that teams are not laser-focused on what needs to be accomplished week to week. They often fall into the trap, for example, of doing what’s urgent rather than what’s important.

What’s far more effective is to create quarterly marketing plans throughout the year. Quarterly plans create sense of urgency to your team, plus they are more action oriented. Additionally, through quarterly planning it is easier for your team to follow the path goal step wise, to know what to do this week, and to know what to do this month. You can then track your progress weekly or monthly, and ensure that you hit your quarterly goals without fail

2. Defining the End Goals

We come across many clients and what surprises us time and again is how many of them fail to establish clear end goals.

Always set a clearly stated and quantifiable goal, when you set your goals as part of your marketing planning process. For example: Clearly defining the number of how much increase in revenue? Within what timeframe? For which products? In which geographies? Etc.

You must ensure that everyone in the team must be able to relate, understand and relay the Marketing goals. Synergy and emotional & mental alignment among all team members will help you to bring all of your resources and brainpower towards your defined goals.

Don’t juggle too many goals at once, you won’t be able to fulfil any of them properly.

3. Get Creative and proven inputs from your Marketing agency

Brainstorming your marketing plans with your internal team to find a creative idea or solution? Are you finding yourselves running in cycles and recycling the same ideas?

Involve your Marketing from the start of the planning and of course throughout the entire process. Your agency comes with multidimensional experience while working with different brands and formulating new strategies for their new clients. This means that they are exposed to a great deal of new thought processes, approaches and campaigns, and they understand what is working and what is not in the industry.

As Gartner stated in this Annual CMO Spend Research Webinar, “Agencies offer an unparalleled breadth of scope and an ability to offer much-needed external input.”

Want more creative ideas and better results for your company? Easy — just get your marketing agency involved upfront, and set the course steady for achievements.

4. Clearly Define Audience Segments & behaviours

At any given time, you are developing marketing plans, you need to align your goals, strategies and tactics with your target audience and connecting to their various pain points. You must keep revisiting your audience segments and its behaviours.

You might be missing out on the opportunity to break your audience down to further granular segments? This will help you to resonate more deeply with hyper-targeted prospects while helping you to stand out from the rest.

Apparently you also might be ignoring the adjacent audience segments that could be the low-hanging fruit for new sources of profitable revenue. Try to figure out the complimentary audience segment and do a thorough research on them.

For each segment, define the buying behaviour, prioritizing what they are trying to achieve and the challenges they might be facing in achieving them. Try and document the questions that might be possibly running through their minds as they think about your types of offerings / solutions.

5. Budget for Growth

Marketing Planning – Budgeting

With planning your marketing strategies, you have to plan the budgeting, which is a critical element of the process. Most companies look at the previous year’s budget and then either they continue the same or add a small percentage to it. To be absolutely clear, that’s not strategic in any way.

This is the biggest mistake one can make, as the dynamics in the market is always changing with onset of new products and services, demographical factors, pandemic, Changes in Govt policies etc.

Instead, look at your goals — including process goals — and determine what it will take. A common attribute among high-growth companies is a marketing budget that exceeds 10% of revenue. Are you being too defensive in your approach while your competition is taking the leverage? or to smash through your marketing goals?

The way to achieve greater results is to make your team to cut the 20% of last year’s budget from those activities that didn’t perform. And double up 20% on those that performed best. Through this you must double your commitment.

Along with this, incorporate the new and successful approaches and allocate budget for them to yield results for you gradually.

6. Formulate a Marketing Strategy first

Most companies get confused between tactics and strategy. Doing and email marketing or an SEO is not a strategy. It’s just a marketing channel or marketing tool.

To gain a competitive advantage and maximize your marketing results, it’s important that you have a crystal clear marketing strategy and then to fully commit to it in your marketing planning.

Strategy can be simply defined as creating a game plan OR plan of action to win:

For example: What specifically does winning look like? How are you going to win? Determine how will you do it consistently? How will you do it decisively? And then materialize it with quantifiable planning.

As for marketing strategy, perhaps you’re looking to dominate in a certain area of your industry. Or you’re looking to dominate online. Or you’re looking to be hyper-targeted with each account and to go all in on customization etc.

The important thing is to clearly define your strategy for winning, and then to test various approaches and tactics to get you there.

7. Rethink Your Marketing Mix

Once you have your marketing strategy in place, it’s time to define your specific vehicles, tactics, and calendars in your marketing planning.

Its absolutely essential that you articulate the outcomes you want to see. Be sure of the different marketing vehicles and articulate them clearly for everyone to be in the same page. For example: Opting for content marketing this coming year? Then you must define whether this means blogging, white papers, webinars, videos, podcasts, or other types of content. You need to determine the timing and frequency. Then define the audience per content piece.

Always remember that it’s better to engage in fewer marketing initiatives and to do them exceptionally well than it is to try to take on many initiatives. You’ll be more successful if you go deep rather than going wide.

If your marketing goals are focused on a major achievement in the next six months, then don’t invest your resources and time on those which will take too long.

Likewise, if you don’t have the bandwidth, then do not opt for initiatives that need a group larger than what you have or what you will be able to outsource.

Calculating the projected ROI ahead of time will help you to keep expectations in the reality zone and will enable you to focus your efforts on what matters most.

One additional point as a bonus:

Innovate for Growth

Innovation is an essential ingredient for continual growth.

But innovation doesn’t happen overnight and miraculously. It takes dedicated time and effort in the due course of action.

If you are looking for growth in the coming year, and not to mention the year after that and the one after that, then you must run two businesses concurrently, not just one.

Visualize and execute. Operate your business of today while also running your business of tomorrow. You must reserve at least 10% to 20% of your marketing budget for innovation, testing new things and pushing it to the next level.

Innovation should be a critical element of your marketing planning. The market will not behave the same for you or wait around for you. Your competitors will certainly try to push their way up. It is up to you to look around the corner and stay ahead of your competition and your audience in solving their problems and marketing to them in fresh ways that they can connect emotionally.

7 points to create the best Marketing strategy