The new year is just around the corner. If you’re sitting there, wondering how you’re going to grow your business in 2025, you’re in the right place. Marketing is constantly changing, and the tactics you may have used 5 years ago are often no longer effective. Ensuring you have a solid foundation of how to build a marketing strategy will help you focus your efforts on effective marketing that will stand the test of time for your business.
In this guide, I’ll walk you through the exact steps we take at birr agency to help clients build winning marketing strategies. If you want a deeper dive into why you need a marketing strategy, check out our other article [here]. And if you get stuck or have specific questions, don’t hesitate to book a complimentary call with us!
1. Set Clear and Achievable Goals
Like every adventure, if you don’t know where you’re trying to get to, how will you know when you’ve arrived? At birr agency, the first step we take with clients is to identify both professional and personal goals. After all, no one wants to be working 80-hour weeks forever.
Think Long-Term: Where do you see your business in 10 years? What role do you envision for yourself?
Work Backwards: If your goal is 10 years out, where do you need to be in 5 years to stay on track? How about in 1 year?
Quarterly Priorities: Break the year into actionable 3-month sprints. What top three things can you focus on this quarter to move the needle?
These are the top 3 things for you to focus on for the next 3 months. If you’ve read “Traction” by Gene Wickman, then you will recognize this process as the Entrepreneurial Operating System.
2. Define Your Ideal Customer
Defining your ideal customer is extremely important to help make sure you’re not wasting your time and money marketing to people who will never buy your product/service. Hyper-targeted marketing focusing solely on your ideal customer, will yield great results!
“But hold on”, I can hear you say. “I can’t afford to limit who I am marketing to, I need to attract as many customers as possible!”
I hear you, but as I explained to one client, “When you say you want to target everyone, does that mean you want to appeal to the family of 5, as well as a group of frat boys, with the same campaign?” The obvious answer was “No” and so we were able to refine their targeting. Once you have identified your ideal customers, this leads to the next two steps: where will you find them, and what are their emotional drivers?
3. Locate Your Customers
In the digital age, a lot of focus on marketing is directed towards digital platforms. Primarily social media but, for a lot of small and medium-sized businesses, the best marketing channels may not always be online.
When was the last time you attended a tradeshow, or industry-specific conference? These may be the best bang for your buck in terms of return on investment (ROI) for marketing, particularly when dealing with B2B businesses. A focused effort on channels that allow direct access to your customer will almost always provide more fruitful connections. So consider:
Digital vs. Physical: Does your audience respond better to trade shows, direct mail, or online content?
Prioritize Owned Channels: An engaged email list of 100 subscribers often delivers better ROI than 100,000 social media followers influenced by algorithms.
Once you have figured out where your target customers congregate, you can then determine what type of marketing content you will need to create. Perhaps its trade show handouts? Or “how-to videos”? Maybe it’s more of a direct mail piece. It’s also important to remember, that once you know where your audience is, don’t go in guns blazing, selling them hard on your services. You want to build trust with your audience and demonstrate your knowledge and proficiency in the subject matter. Establish credibility and give them the chance to see your value, then when it’s time for them to spend they already know and trust your name.
4. What Motivates Your Customers?
Understanding your customers’ motivations is one of the most important components of developing marketing content that converts. As much as we like to think of ourselves as rational and logical beings, our primary motivators are more primal. We generally make purchase decisions to avoid, or solve, a very specific pain point.
Ask them in person. Once you’ve figured out where your target customers congregate, this can become your “watercooler” for hearing their problems. Invite them to give you a call, set up a meeting, talk to them like the humans they are!
Get to know them. Understanding their primary problems will help you write copy that details how you will solve their problem. The secret to successful marketing copy isn’t the list of the features your product/service offers but, the solutions your product/service provides to a specific list of problems.
People buy from people (not businesses) Building your personal network of contacts, and demonstrating you understand the issues they face, will make you their go-to solution provider.
5. Build Your Brand
Your brand isn’t just your logo and colour palette. It’s the commitment you as the entrepreneur make to your customers, your team, and your community. It’s the consistency in your message, your voice and your identity.
Key Messages What do you stand for? What are your values? What do you want your customers to think when they hear your name?
Tone of Voice Is your tone strictly professional? Or do you want to infuse it with a bit of humour? There is no right or wrong, it’s all about how your communication style will help you reach your goals.
Visual Identity How do you represent your business? How do you incorporate iconography into visuals and presentations? What does your imagery look like? Is there a colour style (aka “filter”) applied for consistency? Do you only use professionally captured images? Or maybe you only use AI generated images?
You can certainly build out components of your brand as you are building your ideal customer, competitor research, and finding your product-service fit but, each of these components will also help inform your brand, and how you want to communicate and differentiate yourself in the marketplace. It is important to keep in the back of your mind that your brand will evolve alongside your business.
6. Develop A Content Calendar
One of the most valuable insights I’ve gained from working with clients across diverse industries is the significant advantage of developing a comprehensive content calendar. By planning well in advance, you can identify content themes and topics that are evergreen for your audience, and start crafting the content that will attract them. By allocating the time at the start of the year (or whenever you sit down to build a calendar) you will ensure that you have ideas throughout the year and avoid wasting time on impromptu brainstorming sessions or even missing important events/dates.
Content pillars are the types, or topics of content you will create. Take the time to brainstorm all of the different options that might be applicable to your business, and then cull it back to 2-4 that will be the most impactful. Examples could be:
expert insights,
behind the scenes,
user-generated-content (UGC) highlights,
interviews with clients/ customers, case studies, etc.
When you choose your content pillars, make sure that they are relevant to your business goals and audience needs.
Develop a schedule Build out a schedule in a spreadsheet to save having to learn a new software, or pay a recurring fee. Map out the entire year, by week, input key dates/holidays throughout the year and any seasonality to your business cycle. Once these are mapped out, start to brainstorm the specific topics you want to focus on, keeping in mind your content pillars, and seasonality.
Optimize your content Repurpose your content across multiple platforms. Create one longer, high-quality piece of content, and then edit it accordingly and share it across all of your marketing platforms. Make sure that you’re pointing people back at the longer, more in depth, piece! This idea can be applied to image/video based or written/print content.
On your content calendar, you should include each channel you use, and how each piece of content will support your business goals.
7. Incorporate Strong Calls to Action (CTAs)
One of the biggest mistakes we see small and medium-sized businesses make in their marketing is that there is not a clear Call to Action (CTA). The point of a CTA is to lead you audience to what you want them to do next. A clear CTA can mean the difference between a passive reader and an engaged customer.
Examples of Strong CTAs:
“Book a free consultation to start building your strategy today!”
“Download our Ideal Customer Persona Template to refine your targeting.”
When someone interacts or follows through on your CTA, it should lead them to a specific location. For example, a digital ad should take them directly to a targeted landing page. A phone number should lead directly to someone who can answer questions about your product/ service, or make a sale. If you make someone click more than twice to get a result, you’ve lost them as a customer, likely forever.
Your Marketing Strategy in Action
You should now understand how to build a marketing strategy. By following these steps, you will have a well-rounded marketing strategy that aligns with your business and personal goals. It will ensure that you are focusing on channels and platforms where your ideal customer spends time. More importantly, it will help you make smarter decisions, optimize resources, and achieve long-term success.
Ready to get started? Grab a pencil and piece of paper, and start working your way through these topics, writing down whatever comes to mind. If you need support, we’re here to help. Let’s make 2025 the year you take your marketing to the next level!
