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.

First of all, we need to understand why is segmentation of audience necessary while we create marketing strategies and plan our moves around them.

A campaign can be successfully run only if the specific audience relate it to their need and relate is as a means of solution to their pain areas. Of course this is different when the products and services are in the luxury category. Let us see how many categories we can do the segmentation to plan out approach systematically using the correct marketing vehicles and content.

• Industry
• Geography
• Demography
• Psychography
• Behavioural
• Decision Maker

Let us broadly understand what each of them signifies.

Industry wise segmentation

Whenever we have a product / services that is meant for a wide range of audiences, we need to ensure that our content and communication process is rather specific than flat.

For example: If we are providing SEO services and run a leadgen campaign. Let’s consider that we end up with 100 leads. Out of which I do a first level of segmentation industry wise and find out that I have got 20 leads each from FMCG, ITES, Retail, Hospitality and pharmaceutical industry.

If I have to run a follow up creative campaign or send a standard mailer, do you think that all the five different industry segments will connect or relate to it in the same fashion? The answer is simply NO. This is a big reason why, the email campaigns, WhatsApp campaigns fail massively.

Now let us deep dive into further segmentation of the five industries. If I do a detailed profiling I might find that in the Pharmaceutical segment there are companies which manufactures medicines and then there are companies who are into medical equipment and rest are into Med-Tech.  Here we need to understand that each of their GTM, target audiences, pain areas are different. Therefore, we will have to create another level of segmentation of the same. Here we need to understand their business and the pain areas. Now it becomes easier to draft content, creatives and communicate to them with the message which addresses their need and the pain areas.

Geography wise Segmentation

Doing a segmentation based on geography opens up new avenues of marketing approaches and use of marketing vehicles more effectively. The Geography wise segmentation should be done in 6 different ways:

1. Location (country, state, city, etc.)
2. Time zone
3. Climate and season
4. Cultural preferences
5. Language
6. Population type and density (urban, suburban, or rural)

Each of these factors of segmentation gives us the clarity in defining our audience clearly and draft our communication creatively and strategically to position our products and services.

For example, in a highly diversified country like India, the communication for positioning the same product and service will have to be different for every state followed by the population type. There are states where emotional branding needs to be used rather than straight forward messaging.

Demography wise Segmentation

In Demographic segmentation we divide the market into smaller categories based on demographic factors, such as age, gender, and income etc. Instead of reaching an entire market, we uses this method to focus our resources into a defined group within that market.

Dividing the market into smaller segments, each with a common variable, allows us to use our time and resources more efficiently. The communication can be strategically customised to give better results.

The common factors of demographic segmentations are:

1. Age
2. Gender
3. Ethnicity
4. Income
5. Level of education
6. Religion
7. Occupation
8. Family structure

This allows the target audiences to identify with our brand and they feel like we understand their pain areas and their needs, which makes them more likely to do business with us over longer periods.

Psychography wise segmentation

We may not realise consciously, but psychographic segmentation is the primary driving factor in our lives. It’s the invisible factor that guides most of our decision making. That’s because psychographic segmentation determines who we allow into our lives and which social circles we desire to enter.

In the past, marketers could rely primarily on demographic segmentation like age, income, gender or family size to find buyer matches. But today, demographics alone fail to give a holistic picture of our segment.

The right way to start psychographic segmentation is to conduct research about the interests and hobbies of our customers. This is a fairly easy step because the methodology is straightforward and, for the most part, people are willing to talk about their interests.

We will have analyse the mind-sets through the following factors for e.g.:

1. Sports, music, hobbies, recreation etc.
2. Volunteer groups
3. Activities with their kids
4. Media preferences
5. Social and political Values
6. Opinions about current events
7. Brand preferences
8. Personality types (introvert or extrovert)
9. Travelling preferences
10. Professional and networking associations

Once we see the patterns in the interests of our customers, the next step is to identify where they come together. For example:

1. Facebook groups
2. Podcasts
3. Reddit Music festivals
4. Professional and networking associations
5. Video games
6. Sporting events
7. TV and radio
8. Tourist locations
9. Blogs
10. Religious events

The advantages of psychographic segmentation can be states as follows:

• Better understanding of consumer behaviour by research and analysis of their personalities, lifestyles, or social status etc.
• When there is a customization of products and services is involved, then psychographic segmentation type is very important.
• This provides details about their decision making factors such as lifestyles, interests, opinions, etc.

Behaviour Wise Segmentation

Behavioural segmentation is a method of grouping customers by their behaviour patterns customers’ interactions with their brand, like their purchase history and website interactions. They can also track behaviours that correlate with the customer lifecycle, such as getting married, having a baby or buying a home, and seasonal spending behaviours like holiday shopping.

It can answer questions like How many times they visit your website / online store before purchasing? or Which promotional message – a discount code or a free shipping guarantee – is more likely to nudge them towards a higher-value purchase?

The advantage of Behavioural segmentation broadly is to:

• Identify the most engaged users
• Improving message accuracy
• Providing personalized experiences
• Creates emotional connect
• Helps in building brand loyalty

Behavioural Segmentation can be classified into for types for better understanding:

Segmentation based on behaviour of Usage and purchase.

It can be further classified into factors like:

1. Number of interactions with your business does a customer need before proceeding to conversion.
2. Various search queries a customer used to locate your brand, product or service.
3. Kind of questions a customer asks when using a live chat or virtual assistant etc.

Segmentation based on Events / Occasions

Events / Occasions could be national holidays like Diwali, Eid, Christmas etc. or life occasions, such as a marriage, House warming, vacation etc.

These can also occur in a customer’s daily routine. Purchases like a happy hour round of drinks, caffeinated morning drink, timeline bound sale etc. are all types of occasion-based purchases as they are only bought during those precise times.

Segmentation based on usage benefits

Grouping the data by benefits looked for, helps us to narrow down the specifics of what drives customers to purchase. This reveals which product feature or service aspect they feel most connected to. It can be further categorised into factors like:

• Quality: What makes your product better than your competitors?
• Usage: How will it benefit your customer when they use it?
• Customer Feedback: Are your customers happy with the product or service, or are there areas for improvement?
• USPs: What makes your product unique from other already existing products?
• Additional Benefits: Are there other advantages a customer could receive from purchasing your products or services?

Segmentation based on Customer Loyalty

This helps significantly to zero in on existing repeat customers, their needs, behaviour patterns etc. Besides generating repeat revenue from our business, loyal customers are incredibly useful in terms of referrals, word of mouth, and feedback.

Utilizing the valuable information from this segment can help us to optimize future campaigns, improve our value propositions, strengthen positioning etc. The broadly identifying factors are:

• What were the key behaviours were throughout the customer journey that nurtured loyalty.
• Which customers are the most appropriate or ideal type for loyalty programs.
• What factors are most essential in keeping those segments of customers happy.
• Which ways the value received from loyal customers can be maximized.

Decision Maker Wise Segmentation

This is done mainly for the B2B customers where the decision makers like the CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, CMOs etc. plays the critical role in the buying decision.

Even though the vertical heads, VPs, business heads come up with recommendations with the internal feedback from the users of the organization and the procurement teams, yet in most cases if the C level personnel has set their preferences then the probability of going ahead with that product or services is higher.

This form of segmentation and the positioning goes hand in hand with the Industry wise segmentation. Here the research and analysis of the companies’ sales and finance history is very important to understand the trend they are getting into, understand their future plans. Thus positioning the products / services can be done strategically with the right kind of content marketing.

Brand identity is how we want to portray our business to our customers in a way that they can identify it and relate to it easily and also that they can recall it at any point of time.

This includes how we design of our logo, choose our business name, the colours and shapes or graphics we use, the tagline of the brand, the language we use etc.

Brand identity is different than brand image, which is the result of these efforts. i.e. a good brand identity translates into a positive brand image. The strongest brand identities are instantly recognisable– even to small children – and immediately convey a message about that business, and as a matter of fact the user can recall the same without a stammer.

Here are the top five reasons of the importance of Brand identity:

1. Personality: A brand identity is the visual representation of the values and “personality” of our brand. Identity design essentially sets the tone of the brand, and it can be used to generate specific feelings in the audience. The brand identity should be designed to communicate the company’s overall message that gets imprinted in the audiences’ memory.
2. Consistency: Developing a brand identity allows us to create a consistent message across all marketing communications. Every element should be uniform and follow a specific pattern / format like same basic styles and design elements, creating a cohesive branding package, maintaining the brand colour, the font styles etc.
3. Differentiation: A brand identity helps to differentiate our business from the competition and appropriately position our brand. To stand out to potential customers in the market, the brand identity has to be professional, creative and easily relatable. It should never be complex in nature. The audiences always remember simple and catchy names, creative designs and attractive colours (not at all the ones that’s are too loud).
4. Awareness: Creating a brand identity package ensures that the brand is at the forefront of all the marketing materials and communications, which leads to increased brand awareness. The more places the brand is featured, more contact it will make with consumers, and the more recall value it will create.
5. Loyalty: An effective brand identity always helps to build customer loyalty and trust in a brand, as it allows customers to make a connection between a product and the company very easily

Brand Identity : The knowledgeable and the ignorant.

A company’s brand identity is an extremely critical element which has to be correct. When time and effort is invested towards the same, it can bring tangible results without a doubt.

Many company owners / entrepreneurs think otherwise and argue on this topic. That’s where they make the primary mistake. Every single brand that is renowned has worked towards the brand identity resulting in an excellent brand image.

There are many company owners / entrepreneurs who constantly denies the primary factors like application of Golden ratio and colour science in designing the logo. They don’t even understand whether an image based logo or a text based logo will be suitable for their business, they fail to understand the importance of using brand identity across all marketing channels and communication.

Brand identity cannot and should not be compromised or put in the secondary importance category. It has to be done by experienced professional to bring out the best of a brand Identity.