Guide to Implementing an Effective Marketing Strategy

To build an effective marketing strategy, a business needs to first build a viable outline of its goals and objectives.

Although almost any company nowadays actively engages in various initiatives, many marketers fail to build successful digital marketing campaigns. The most important thing to achieve something is to have a ready-to-go, thoroughly polished plan.

Creating an effective marketing strategy is a laborious task. It involves multiple stages and research. However, every effort is worth the time.

A complete marketing strategy gives a holistic view of what needs to be done. Also, it helps align the efforts of team members, presenting each employee with a clear view of what their key objectives are.

These efforts will also help you acquire valuable insights during the ideation process. These include USPs (unique selling points), competitive analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, and content ideas.

Your marketing strategy isn’t just about selling—it’s about helping. Great marketing focuses on your audience’s challenges and offers solutions that truly matter.
– Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs

How Does An Effective Marketing Strategy Look Like?

On a daily basis, we have a countless number of tasks, overlapping with one another. When we add the constantly evolving market and customers’ consent, it’s just impossible to aim all your marketing efforts in one direction, follow the same style, and create a holistic omnichannel brand reputation online.

Often, the success of a complete marketing strategy is hard to estimate. That’s true because marketers act much more as a support mechanism for the business.

Yet, a successful deal with a client is the result of both the salesperson, pitching the offer, and the marketer, planting the initial emotion towards the brand and attracting users’ attention.

The contribution of the sales team is easily measurable, being the price of the closed deal. However, the marketer’s achievements are much more complex to determine, as it’s tricky to estimate what percentage of successful deals could be attributed to them.

An effective marketing strategy is a thorough game plan that shows how the company will reach and convert potential clients and achieve greater results.Also, its ultimate goal is to support the overall business efforts in line with the KPIs and objectives.

What You Need Before You Start

So, how to create a digital marketing strategy? First, make sure you have access to a significant amount of information up front to build a thorough plan. An effective marketing strategy will give you a birds-eye-view of all goals and initiatives of the business.

First of all, to attract and convert leads you should know who your target audience is. Get to know their demographics, location, what channels they use, what drives them to act, their preferences and pain points.

In other words – you need to make a psychographic profile of your ideal customer. You have to use the data you have about current clients, listen to conversations in social media and forum threads.

In addition,conduct interviews with current and potential customers to get additional insights to start building an effective marketing strategy.

Then you have to group the collected information into buyer personas, that will help you get significant insights into all client-related goals in your marketing strategy.

Another useful data you’ll need to know is where on the market you currently are and what competitors are doing. Competitor research will help you kick start an effective marketing strategy for growth.

Such information will be useful to come up with ideas on how to increase your market share and reach a larger audience.

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis is an honest and informative presentation of your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Its main purpose is to help you identify problem areas in your business performance that you need to address and opportunities you can leverage.

Use the data you gathered during the competitor research to compare your company against others in the same industry. This way, you can then come up with competitive advantages, unique selling points, and market opportunities for your product or service.

For example, let’s say you’re selling consumer goods and among your strengths is your service. However, your weaknesses are the lack of customer driven marketing strategy and the inability of users to purchase your product online.

Digitalizing your currently outstanding service with direct sales channel (website eCommerce, Amazon, eBay, etc.) is an amazing opportunity to increase your market segment.

Also, you will manage to reduce the threat of losing clients due to the inability to offer a convenient service for the digital era.

Strategy Canvas

Another vital element of an effective digital marketing strategy is the strategy canvas. It is a line graph that displays the company’s performance in key areas and overlays it with industry or competitors benchmarks.

As with the SWOT analysis, the easiest way to do it is to use the information you gather via your competitor research.

Take the current market position of competitors and industry leaders. Then, turn it into a score against which you could rank your company for each key area.

The main purpose of the strategy canvas is to present your company’s current position in an easy-to-grasp infographic way.

It helps align team efforts and point out weak links within the division. This way, you will know what you need to improve and how quickly you should address each flaw.

Using Balanced Scorecards

A balanced scorecard is the core of successful digital marketing campaigns. It’s a block diagram displaying key goals, their relations, and progress made on them to provide managers with powerful monitoring capabilities.

This holistic view of all initiatives, goals and their connections also grants your marketing team an additional layer of flexibility. That’s because when you change a certain element of the strategy you can view what goals and initiatives the changed element affects and in what way.

What are the Key Elements of a Balanced Scorecard?

1. Finance Perspective
2. Customer Perspective
3. Employee Perspective

One of the main characteristics of a balanced scorecard is its multi-level approach – breaking the marketing strategy into layers you could easily view and understand, seeing the relations between them.

Useful exemplary levels that will help you understand the internal process better and see their external impact is to break the scorecard into 4 perspectives.

Finance Perspective

The finance perspective consists of goals relating to the financial aspect of your marketing efforts, usually presented as the highest layer as it’s the financial expression of all other goals’ results. Examples: “Control Marketing Costs” or “Increase Revenue Stream.”

Customer Perspective

The customer perspective includes goals relating to the customers’ viewpoint. Examples: “Raise Brand Awareness,” “Generate More Leads,” “Educate Target Market” or “Clear Value Proposition.”

Process Perspective

The process perspective involves goals connected to the internal processes that are happening behind-the-scenes from a customer viewpoint. Their results directly affect the goals at the customer level. Examples: “Automate internal processes,” “Introduce a Reporting Framework,” or “Facilitate product development/service design ideas.”

Employee Perspective

The employee perspective consists of goals linked to the employees and the corporate culture within the company. These goals are the basis of the marketing strategy and support all others. Examples: “Adopt a Proactive Mindset,” “Think Critically,” or “Optimize Marketing Toolkit.”

Scorecards present goals at different levels within the organization to align efforts and ensure all team members understand what’s needed of them. This way the marketing strategy is presenting the goals of all stakeholders – employees, managers, partners, and investors.

Balanced scorecards are incredibly useful because they serve as a simple infographic presentation of your whole strategy, breaking complex relations into easy-to-gasp goals, layers, and initiatives.

Define Your Strategic Goals

One of the most important things you need to do when creating an effective marketing strategy is to define the results that the company wants to achieve.

Your strategic planning goals might be increasing brand awareness, implementing a cost-effective approach, organizing the work-distribution process, implementing monitoring capabilities, increasing flexibility, introducing a new product, or entering new markets.

How to Formulate Your Goals

Well, as we’ve mentioned in the first article about implementing a reliable and effective marketing strategy, before starting with your strategy, you have to do competitor research and define your buyer personas. As a result, you’ll most certainly mark areas you need to improve to achieve greater results.

The goals are not precise tasks that need to be performed such as “Create buyer personas” or “Redesign website.” They’re more thorough and address broader issues, serving as a guide to making precise tasks for each goal. A goal should represent all of the tasks needed to be done in a certain area.

While formulating the goals of your company or department, focus on existing problems as well as long-term marketing opportunities. This will help you come up with successful digital marketing campaigns both for the long- and short-term.

Goal Strategies

Each strategic goal is related to another. This way “Optimize service communication in all channels” is directly contributing to “Make the value proposition more attractive for prospects.” It is a good practice to link the goals to one another, symbolizing their relations.

This way marketers will be able to know who they are dependent on for desired results and managers will be able to easily monitor processes and tasks.

Strategic Themes

Once you’ve defined your strategic planning goals, it’s advisable to group them into strategic themes. Each theme should represent a broader area of interest.

Good exemplary themes are “Product Communication & Development,” “Business Growth,” or “Teamwork and team capabilities.”

This differentiation will help everyone within the team to understand the expectations and what their work output is contributing to. It’ll also mark certain goals as part of the same theme, enabling a more thorough understanding for the viewer.

Add Strategic Initiatives to Each Goal

The strategic initiatives are time-framed projects and programs outside of everyday operational activities. Their aim is to help the company achieve its marketing and business goals.

Examples of such initiatives are “Creating and using a dashboard to monitor progress,” “Creating a Blog Space,” or “Planning and conducting an ICO.”

Each strategic initiative is always linked to a goal. If you come up with an initiative but you can’t link it to a goal, you either didn’t formulate your goals adequately. Alternatively, the initiative may not contribute in an obvious way to the results you want to achieve and thus might be unnecessary.

Initiatives give goals in an effective marketing strategy an additional depth, presenting an in-depth view of all creative efforts required. Let’s say we have a goal “Raise Brand Awareness” that is part of the “Business Growth” theme.

Strategic initiatives connected to it might be to “Create a Blog Space,” “Optimize Newsletters,” “Create Social Media Content Strategy,” or “Participate in niche events.”

Description

The initiatives put the vision into practice. Each of them should have a description explaining how it will influence the end goal. As a result, employees and stakeholders will have a better understanding of the overall strategy.

Key Performance Indicators

As marketers, you have probably worked with KPIs. Yet, in order for a marketing strategy to be effective, you’ll have a countless amount of those to track. A KPI or key performance indicator is a quantifiable measure that evaluates the success of an organization, employee, or initiative.

These metrics could be quite simple. Examples include “percentage of employees being HubSpot certified”, or much more complex such as “COCA (Cost of Customer Acquisition” that’s equal to the total marketing investment, divided by the number of acquired customers.”

Here’s an example of the most significant email marketing KPIs:

You can track the performance of each strategic initiative with at least one KPI. Also, set a target you want to achieve to see the progress made towards completing this goal.

Linking KPIs to initiatives will help you monitor their performance, indicating potential problems and weak areas.

Distributing Tasks

The final stage of implementing an effective marketing strategy is to distribute specific activities related to a particular initiative to each team member.

For example, if we have to break the initiative “Create a Blog Space” into tasks, it should look similar to this:

• Create Page Structure & Design
• Design Page & Blog Post Template
• Create Content Strategy for the Blog
• Pick Topics
• Write Posts On the Topics
• Edit Content
• Add CTAs & Pictures
• Publish

How To Divide Work In Your Marketing Team?

Effective management is, as any team member can tell you, a key to building an effective marketing strategy. The most critical element of team operations is making sure that tasks are equally shared among members of the group.

This can be a challenge for even the most experienced managers, as it requires a delicate balance of experience, rationale, and intuition.

However, when done correctly, dividing work equally can help to ensure that all team members engage and are able to achieve the company goals efficiently.

By taking the time to carefully consider how work should be divided among team members, managers can set their teams up for success.

There are a few key things to keep in mind when dividing work among team members:

1. Make sure that everyone has a chance to contribute.
2. Avoid giving too much work to any one person.
3. Be aware of different skills and abilities within the team.
4. Take into account the workloads of individual team members.
5. Be flexible and willing to adjust the division of work as needed.

By taking these factors into consideration, managers can ensure they divide work fairly among team members to contribute to an effective marketing strategy. This can help to create a more cohesive and productive team overall.

RACI Matrix

The RACI Matrix is a chart that maps tasks and initiative against 4 roles:

• (R) Responsible – The person responsible for delivering the task and making the decisions regarding it. The “Responsible” role could be assigned to more than 1 person, but it’s a good practice to keep the number of people involved up to the required minimum.
• (A) Accountable – The person is both responsible for the task and its completion. They’re not doing the work but are responsible for making sure it’s finalized. It’s highly recommended to have just one accountable person per initiative.
• (C) Consulted – This person assists the Responsible one by providing information, insights, and guides. For example, if you’re a copywriter writing an article about a complex tech product, it’s advisable to consult the product development team before reading Google and trying to get it all on your own.
• (I) Informed – A person who’s not directly involved in the task, but the outcome can affect them or their work. Thus, they should be kept Informed regarding the progress on the task. Usually, communication in such cases is one way to ease the internal process of knowledge-sharing.

Exactly the 4 roles of the RACI matrix are responsible for its name.

The RACI is extremely useful when distributing tasks as it gives you a clear view of what everyone within the team or department has to do and makes it easy for managerial personnel to organize the internal processes.

It helps to communicate the tasks to each person without overloading them with work they can’t handle. Most importantly the RACI is a great way to present each employee with a clear view of what’s expected of them, thus aligning the efforts of team members across the whole marketing department.

In case you don’t find the RACI to be the perfect fit, there’re other similar role-based matrixes that could serve you better such as:

• CARS (Communicate, Approve, Responsible, Support)
• RASCI (Responsible, Accountable, Supportive, Consulted, Informed)
• RAS (Responsible, Approve and Support)
• CLAM (Contributes, Leads, Approves, Monitors)

Summary

Although if done correctly the marketing strategy can be an extremely powerful tool that drives your company’s or department’s success, it’s a cumbersome initiative that requires a ton of research, both initially and during the creation.

Furthermore, an effective marketing strategy without a knowledge-centric approach, using all aspects of the strategy to gain insights and polish your creative efforts, is as good as missing.

So, roll your sleeves up, open an Excel sheet and a browser, and start surfing the web to collect the data that will help you slash through the competition and become the audience favorite.

Start gathering your data and look for the upcoming second part of this article, where we’ll explain in detail how to create and polish each part of the marketing strategy.

If you can’t handle it all on your own, don’t worry. DevriX is an excellent choice for a successful market expansion.