Entrepreneurs are “doers”. They get an idea for a business, and they go get after it. Whether you’re in start-up mode, or you’re established and looking to grow into the next phase of your business, investing the time to build a marketing strategy will help you avoid many pitfalls. And improve your ROI. Tactics – as the visible actions of marketing (think social posts, ads, etc.), are only as good as the strategy that is driving the activity. This article will walk you through the most important things to consider when you’re building a marketing strategy, and help save you a lot of time, wasted ad spend, and avoid many common marketing pitfalls.
What’s the Difference Between Marketing Strategy, Plan, and Tactics?
When describing the difference between a strategy, plan, and tactics, I like to give the analogy of building a house. When you start out, you need to understand what exactly you’re trying to build, If you don’t have the end goal in mind, you have nothing to guide your decisions along the way. Nor do you have an easy way to communicate that with others. Are you aiming for a 6 bedroom, 7 bath, 10,000sqf custom home? Or perhaps its a <400sqf Tiny Home? Both provide a home to live in, but with very different requirements to successfully build. Clearly defining the final vision of the building is the same as defining your marketing strategy upfront. Your marketing plan is analogous to your architectural drawings, its used to communicate the strategy to everyone. And your tactics would be similar to the techniques used in construction, and all of the decisions around finishes and fixtures. Many entrepreneurs and business owners make the mistake of starting their marketing by thinking of the tactics they are going to use. But, much like you’re not going to go out and start buying fixtures, appliances, and other finishings for your new home before you’ve even thought through what that home should look like, you shouldn’t start thinking of tactics until you have a marketing plan in place.
Marketing Strategy
This is your big picture. Why are you marketing? What are you marketing? Who is your target customer? Why will they purchase from you? What influences their decisions? Where do they spend their time? All of these factors will heavily influence what your plan and tactics end up looking like.
Marketing Plan
This is an actionable roadmap. It should outline the steps you need to take to get to your business or marketing goals, and timelines for implementing your tactics.
Marketing Tactics
These are the specific actions and tools that you will use to implement the marketing plan (eg. Facebook ad, email marketing campaign, media relations blitz, website updates etc.)
Marketing Activity Hierarchy
(This could just as easily be seen inverted, where the strategy is the top of your funnel, and you work your way down to the tactics being the pointy end, but in order to keep the metaphor of a house build, the marketing strategy is the base, or foundation.)
Why You Need a Marketing Strategy First
Starting with your strategy lays the groundwork for what you are wanting to accomplish. It clarifies who you need to reach, your core messaging, and your unique selling proposition (USP). With a strategy, you can develop realistic budgets- both for time and financial resources.
Key benefits of a Strategy First approach:
- Clarity on target audience and core messaging
- Effective budget planning
- Alignment with larger business goals
Benefits of a Marketing Plan
While your marketing strategy helps set the direction, your plan maps out the steps to get you there. A marketing plan brings structure and organization to your marketing efforts, helps you communicate requirements with your team, and ensures alignment with your goals.
This helps significantly reduce the “Oh shit, I haven’t done any marketing for my business in the last 3 weeks” as you’re falling asleep on a Tuesday night.
With a marketing plan, you can:
- Schedule tasks and batch-create content in advance
- Creating blocks of time in your calendar to hammer out 20-30 social media posts is significantly more effective and efficient than trying to come up with a post every day.
- Track your progress over time, and make adjustments as required
- Marketing is a marathon, not a sprint, and good marketing takes time to build its effectiveness.
- Allocate resources more effectively
- It’s much easier to say “No” to last-minute advertising opportunities, or “Yes” if they align with your plan.
Like any major project, mapping out the activity and requirements to a timeline helps to ensure that everyone is on the same page, and that action is being taken on time.
How to Choose the Best Marketing Tactics for Your Business
With a strategy and plan in place, you can identify the most effective tactics for your business’s goals. When you jump into marketing tactics without having a clear strategy and plan, you risk creating campaigns that don’t resonate with your target audience, waste limited resources, and are inconsistent with your brand and messaging.
Its important that you have a strong understanding of the goals and outcomes you wish to achieve before you launch your next campaign. Is your campaign focused on brand awareness? Or is it focused on selling a specific product/service? The approach required for each is quite different, as are the metrics you will use to measure its effectiveness. Ensuring that your outcomes are mapped out, alongside the customer journey through that campaign, will help you to create a more effective marketing campaign. This will resonate better with your audience, leading to greater success.
A Marketing Strategy Aids Decisions
Having a plan and strategy in place will also enable you to say “No” when a new fad or trend appears on the landscape, and you feel compelled to follow suit. That is not to say that you shouldn’t review your plan and strategy if new and compelling information comes to light, but, you can always determine whether or not a fresh tactic will support your goals by determining how it fits into your strategy.
Perhaps one of the most important aspects of ensuring that you have a strategy and plan in place, particularly for small and medium-size businesses, is that it helps you keep all of your branding and messaging consistent, while maximizing your marketing budget. Without a cohesive strategy and plan, it becomes easy to end up sharing different messaging across different channels, which leads to confusion amongst your target audience. Keeping your messaging and visuals consistent across all touchpoints is one of the most important aspects of growing your brand recognition.
How to Develop a Marketing Strategy
Developing a marketing strategy and plan is not an overly complicated process. However, it does require that you dedicate some time to considering your current situation, and the goals you’d like to achieve.
Identify your Goals and Objectives
Where do you see your business in 5, 10, 25 years? If you’re an entrepreneur, where do you as an individual fit into that vision? From that future, work backwards to what the next 3 years, 1 year, quarter, and month look like. This will help you break down your goals into actionable tasks for you to focus on in the coming weeks and months to achieve.
When you set goals, it’s important that you make them S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound). By ensuring your goals are smart, you will ensure that they align with your business objectives, and provide yourself with a means of tracking progress.
Define your Target Audience
The more you can define and identify your target audience, the better you will be at crafting your messaging to speak to their specific needs. Developing personas is a tactic that helps you “get in the mind” of your ideal customer. Your personas should go beyond demographics, and think to the psychological and personality traits of the individual. You’ll want to focus on the challenges and problems they face. This lets you articulate how your product or service will solve that problem.
Identify your Key Messaging and Channels
What do you want someone to think of when they think of your business? Your key messages are bite-sized summaries that tell people what you do, why you do it, how you are different, and the value you bring to the table. You will likely have more than one key message.
Your marketing channels are the locations where you will spread your key messages. You will identify the channels to focus on based on your target audience. Choose channels where they congregate and seek out information. This could be a social media group, or it could be an industry-specific print publication. It could be an in-person event, or perhaps ib a specific TV channel. Each target audience is unique, and the better understanding you have of your audience, the more effective your messaging and channel selection will be.
Build your Marketing Plan
Now that you have your strategy outlined- you’ve identified your goals and objectives, your target audience, and your key messages and channels, its time to build your marketing plan. I like to work on a 12-month calendar schedule, as that helps you identify key opportunities over the coming months, and prepare any materials/content in advance.
I always start out very high level with themes or topics for each quarter and/or month. From there I start to break out the specific channels I am going to use, and the content that will be shared in each channel. By focusing on a high level theme to start, you are able to keep your key messages on-topic across all touchpoints and channels. Depending on how you like to work, you can get as granular as you want in the plan. I like to have the Master Plan in a spreadsheet, and link out to specific content in other spreadsheets or documents.
For example, I would have my master plan, and then I would have a link to a Public Relations spreadsheet where we have mapped out all of our target publications and incorporated their editorial calendars into the 12-month schedule so that we can approach them for features or expert content on appropriate subject matters for our clients. We would have another spreadsheet where we place all of the social media content so that it can get created well in advance, and then scheduled accordingly. We might have a third spreadsheet with all of our paid ads. And the list goes on. Your business is unique; your goals are unique, and so your marketing plan will be unique too.
Case Study: Isosceles Business Solutions
Here in the Elk Valley of British Columbia, Isosceles Business Solutions is a homegrown business success story. Launched by Ryan Doehle in his parents garage while he was still in highschool, Isosceles grew to become the only Managed Service Provider in the region. Recognizing that they had reached their full potential in the area, they wanted to expand their business footprint geographically into the rest of the Kootenays. They approached birr agency to help them develop a strategy and plan to accomplish this. They knew from experience, that throwing money at digital ads, sporadic posts to social media, and other ad hoc marketing was not helping them grow.
The Process
Following our process, we helped them identify their goals and objectives, target audience, and key messages and channels. With this information, we were able to develop a tactical activity plan so they could achieve their long-term business goals.
- Goals and Objectives- raise awareness of existing services in new markets, build closer links with existing clients through better business communications, grow business to be largest IT service provider in the Kootenays within 3 years.
- Target client is a small to medium sized corporate organizations in the Kootenays, specifically the Columbia Valley and East Kootenay region. They are focused on operations for their business, and do not have the capacity to manage their own IT needs, but aren’t big enough to hire internally.
- Key Messages and Channels- The key messaging revolved around the idea of #everythingIT, whereby they could handle all of your business IT needs. The channels for communicating and marketing included social media, specifically Facebook and Linkedin, media relations around the corporate donations of time and staff volunteerism in the local communities they operate in, and developing annual reporting to all of their clients, with suggestion for helping streamline their IT requirements.
Perhaps the two key aspects of all of this work were the recognition that they needed to rebrand to improve their visual identity, one that better reflected their advanced professional IT skills, as well as a new website that spoke to the problems some of their clients faced in the past, and the solutions they provided them. By updating the website, and developing landing pages focused on specific services, Isosceles was able to point specific campaigns at targeted landing pages, and generate analytics for the results. This also allowed for better search engine optimization (SEO), and more intuitive navigation.
The results
The end result of this strategy and plan did not end up being their growth into the largest IT services provider in the Kootenays, but rather, positioned them as a strategic partner for a larger firm to acquire them so that they could gain a foothold in the region. The owners were just as happy with this outcome.
Now its your turn…
If you’ve read this far, you probably recognize the importance of developing a marketing strategy and plan before committing to tactics. If your business is established, and you are looking to grow your business to a new level, birr agency is here to help. Book a complimentary discovery call to learn more about our services.
