Marketing Strategy Essentials
Marketing Strategy Essentials
Its important to note that marketing is not a standalone, one-off activity. Marketing is made up of multiple components that are necessary throughout each and every stage of a business activities. From prospecting through to after sales with this process taking months to years having a strategy in place is essential.
Marketing strategy is defined as the business’s overall game plan for reaching prospective leads and turning them into customers of the products or services the business provides. Generally, it involves the company’s value proposition, key brand messaging, data on target customer demographics, and other high-level elements.
A methodically designed plan created to outline and guide marketing activities with the aim of achieving specific outcomes is a marketing strategy. It provides the foundation upon which all marketing decisions are made. The ultimate function of a marketing strategy is to focus your marketing objectives and campaigns and keep these efforts aligned with the wider company goals.
Internal and external factors have to be taken into consideration in any good marketing strategy.
- Internal factors include the marketing mix, performance analysis, budgetary constraints, etc.
- External factors are elements like customer experience, competitor analysis, the socio-economic environment, and so on.
For many companies who don’t fully embrace the strategic marketing process, that’s why many marketing strategies are partially reactive and planned.

The Five Major Components of a Marketing Strategy?
1. Target audience
Your target audience describes the “people” who are most likely to identify with your products or services. So that you can convert leads profitably it’s important that you confidently establish your ideal audience .
Mass marketing brands target anyone and everyone, and is only typically achievable for those businesses that sell products that are universally needed. Most businesses concentrate on specific, niche groups of people or target several different audiences. The process of market segmentation is required to define, redefine, or re-establish your ideal target audience.
There are four main types of market segmentation: Demographic (age, income, gender, marital status, etc.) , Geographic (location, culture, urbanicity, climate, language) , Psychographic (values, lifestyles, likes, dislikes, opinions, etc.) and Behavioural (actions made within a website, in-app, in-store)
By conducting interviews, creating online surveys, looking at census data, exploring social media analytics, analysing the actions that customers and prospects make will help you collect demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioural information.
Buyer personas can be created once you have dynamically segmented your customers and prospects’ data. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer, created by utilising your data. Implementing market segmentation and creating buyer personas provides a real-world context for your business. We often find that being able to find a “name” for each of your buying personas helps make the process infinitely more successful.
2. Goals & Objectives
- A goal is something long term that you want to achieve and is a broad, overarching statement
- An objective is more specific, precise and involves the action or actions that will be taken in order to achieve the overall goal.
SWOT analysis when completed correctly is a great way to dive deeper into your company (as well as the wider market environment) and identify some actionable goals and objectives. Please be aware that when done badly at best it amounts to SWAG Stupid Wild Arse Guesses
Conducting a SWOT analysis allows you to identify your business and/or marketing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Providing a clear picture of where you very good, where improvements needed, your potential opportunities and the challenges that you will need to tackle.
What you want to achieve and the objectives you need to attain can be as extensive or as minimal as you like ( months or years)
For any business, regardless of company size, budget or offerings, having strong goals and objectives is very important.
A key thing to remember here is to ensure that your goals and objectives are S.M.A.R.T.:
- S: Specific
- M: Measurable
- A: Achievable
- R: Relevant/realistic
- T: Time-bound
The overall aim of setting goals and objectives in your marketing strategy is to achieve business targets as seamlessly as possible. So, whether it’s focusing on revenue, acquiring new users, improving profitability, growing your brand or venturing into new markets etc
3. Competitor analysis
Competitor analysis is a process where you research competitors that are a potential threat to your business and analyse their
- products / services
- sales and marketing strategies,
- social media presence,
- website, etc.
When competitor analysis is completed accurately and in detail it enables you to get a clear idea of where you sit in the market compared to others and provides a benchmark against which you can measure your business’s growth.
The more intimately you know your competition, the easier it will be to identify potential opportunities and areas in which you can out flank them. We have been into many businesses who have said “We don’t have any competitors” are in the majority of cases incorrect. Even with the most niche product or service, there will always be some form of competition. It may not be direct, but it could simply be alternative areas where potential customers are spending their money
It’s important for you to project the qualities that make your product / service different and why customers and prospects should choose you over other market options – this is the element of “differentiation”
A thorough, usable, relevant competitor analysis takes more than just a quick search on Google. There are a number of specific steps that are required.
4. Content creation
Great authoritative, unique and educational content creation is a truly significant part of modern marketing especially within this digital world. Today’s marketing is than just brash promotional tactics and in your face advertisements. Nowadays great content marketing shows your target audience that you are trustworthy, knowledgeable, and can provide the value and solutions they’re searching for.
In 2020 Hubspot research showed that, in 2020, 70% of marketers claimed to be actively investing in content marketing. So for those companies with dedicated marketing departments or a dedicated marketing employee, this is interesting that they are spending time on content marketing. The reason they are doing this is because the content on a companies website now operates as more than just a slogan or a promotional article. Content marketing has become a key part of the business strategy that functions to project thought leadership.
Content marketing comes in many forms, including blogs, case studies, infographics, webinars, videos, guides, podcasts. Content marketing is growing year-on-year, but it isn’t sufficient to just create content about anything. There is a massive difference between valuable content and content that’s there just for the sake of it. Writing or media that’s poorly targeted or inadequately researched is less likely to convert leads and could come across as a waste of time.
To ensure that the content you create is worthwhile, valuable to your target audience and competitive on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) create a Search Insights Report (S.I.R.). There are four key stages with creating an SIR
1. Focus topic selection: these should be based on the product or service you provide and they act as your main keywords (for example, with Blue Dolphin, one of our main topics is ‘Website Design’ and another is ‘Marketing and Sales Strategy’.
2. Content competitor identification: Importantly these are the brands who rank on SERPs for the same keywords as you not your normal, physical (actual) competitors. For example when I search for “Marketing and Sales Strategy” in Google, I potentially won’t see direct competitors (those who offer a similar product or service). I will see companies that write about the topic of marketing and sales strategy.
How To Tip to find your content competitors, go to your search engine and type in
- “[focus topic] + blogs”,
- “[focus topic] + websites”,
- “[focus topic] + tips”,
- “[focus topic] + examples”.
3. Content competitor evaluation: Analyse content competitors using a keyword research tool so you can see the terms they’re ranking for that your website potentially is not. There are many great tools available such as Moz , Ahrefs, and SEMrush. Currently available for free based on a limited number of keyword searches is a tool called The Hoth. Add your content competitors to the keyword research tool and you will gain a long list of topic-specific keywords.
- Every relevant keyword can be a potential piece of content so long as there isn’t an overwhelming amount of competition
- To evaluate keyword competition look at the Monthly Search Volume (MSV).
- A score between fifty to thousand monthly searches is good / achievable.
- If you’re trying to rank for a keyword that has an MSV of twenty five thousand then it will be significantly more difficult.
Take my example of website design. The keywords that appear in my keyword research tool are: “website design ideas”, “website designs”, “how to design a website”, and their MSV is between 50 – 1000, so it would be sensible to create content using these keywords:
4. Finally, complete your search insights report: It can seem a complex and arduous task, but the Hubspot’s search insights report template. is a very useful tool
To complement in-depth research like a search insights report, ask these additional questions to ensure that your content is worthwhile and significant for your customers and prospects:
- Authenticity – Is this content authentic (i.e. is it genuinely trying to help your audience and not just manipulative)?
- Accuracy – Is this information accurate (does it contain up-to-date statistical data and correct information)?
- Relevance – Does the content match your brand (tone of voice, design, etc.)?
- Answers – Is it answering your target audiences questions?
- Appropriate – For the stages of your customer’s lifecycle is it well-targeted ?
Creating well-structured content that aligns with your company’s purpose will strengthen your brand by adding continued value to your customers.
5. Measurement – What you don’t measure you cant manage
With your marketing efforts and campaigns you need to make sure that your input is equal to, or more than, what you’re gaining in return. Don’t let your marketing campaigns go to waste. You can have the most creative, innovative, ground breaking marketing campaign out there, but if you don’t measure the results, how will you know its success?
Utilising your data, regularly reviewing your actions and measuring your growth will ensure that your tasks, objectives and marketing efforts are being efficiently managed. It is useful to take the following metrics into consideration
- Website traffic: which pages do they visit? How long do they spend on your site? What’s the average bounce rate? What type of device do they use? Do they complete any goals
- Emails: analyse your open rates, click-through rates (CTR), bounce rates, conversions, your CTAs (call-to-action), unsubscribes etc.
- Organic Traffic – what keywords are ranking ? Is your page authority improving?
- Industry benchmarks: Compare your data against industry averages for MQLs, traffic, social media engagement, email open rates, etc.
- MQLs: how many leads are you receiving per week/month? What’s the quality of your leads? How many of them convert?
- Social media: are you gaining new followers or losing them? Do your posts receive enough interaction? Do your social media pages get users to visit your website?
Measuring the impact of your marketing activities gives you the ability to track your success or failures
- If you can identify what’s working then should you simply do more of it
- If it isn’t working STOP and identify why and evaluate what you need to change to improve
A marketing strategy combines all aspects of the customer journey and gives visibility to everyone within the business. This allows the business to focus on the resources available typically time and money and figure out how to use the to their maximum effectiveness. Peter Drucker the father of management thinking defined marketing as “”The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
Marketing Campaign compared to Marketing Strategy
When it comes to marketing, there is often confusion over the difference between a marketing campaign and a marketing strategy. They are very different!
- Marketing campaigns are very focused, short-term initiatives set out to achieve a very specific goal. A marketing campaign, describes the logistical details for each specific project.
- A marketing strategy framework is more of a high level, overall strategic plan that connects the entire brand, and its organisational objectives. The marketing strategy should be developed and used to help inform your marketing campaigns.
- We will cover marketing campaigns in another article as it is also a very detailed activity.
But that is an entirely different topic for another time, so let’s get back to focusing on your marketing strategy…
Target Audience
It is vital to know exactly who you plan to target, before constructing a solid marketing strategy.
Accurately identifying and establishing your target audience is important as it will impact many important marketing decisions
- Pricing – are you bargain bucket, mid price mediocrity, rip off high or reassuringly expensive
- Branding – how will you position your products or services
- What messages you are planning to use – what are the issues of importance and value, that a customer will respond to
- The marketing channels you choose to promote your products or services on – website, email marketing, social media
The more defined your target audience is, the better your marketing strategy will be as you’ll be able to create all of the messaging, brand marketing content, and ads with your target audience in mind.
Its important to bear in mind that as time progresses, and you gather more insight, you will continue to gain a deeper understanding of your target audience and who exactly falls into this group. In marketing things change so you need to be able to learn and adapt to change as circumstances change. For example you might find you need to go after a different group of customers to those you originally set out to reach.
Amazon, have established themselves over the last 26 years as the best e-commerce trader, this has earned them the ability to target everyone and anyone they want. Your target audience simply cannot be everyone
The Importance of a Defined Target Audience
Having a defined target audience is a vital element of your marketing strategy. It enables those involved in marketing to:
- Perfectly tailor content within each campaign to appeal to the emotions and interests of the target audience
- Understand the language used by the target audience, including the phrases and terms that might resonate with them
- Technical terminology is fine if it is exactly what the respondent would expect
- Position their messaging in a way that connects with the audience’s problems, desires, and motivations . This is sometimes referred to as identifying the customers pain
- Establish where the target audience spends their time both in the physical world and on line. This ensures that messaging can be placed in the most effective locations
- Understand what is expected of their products or services for current and future purposes.
Marketing Strategy Essentials
Marketing Strategy Essentials – The Sales Funnel
The sales funnel is sometimes referred to as the marketing funnel or the buyer’s journey. The sales funnel is essentially the path taken by a potential consumer that leads them to the purchase of your product or service.
The idea is that the marketing activities are implemented to draw as many leads as possible into the funnel. Each of these leads are simply nurtured through the different stages and as a business you ultimately end up converting some of them into customers.
In a perfect world, the funnel would be more of a cylinder, meaning that every lead converts into a customer. Unfortunately, in the real world of marketing and sales, this is never the case, hence the reason to narrowing the funnel.
What Does The Sales Funnel Have To Do With Marketing Strategy?
A high priority for marketers should be to create a well thought out sales funnel. For the business completing this process provides great insight into the potential customers thought process, challenges, and decisions that are being made. Your communication with each consumer should be very different based on their stage in your sales funnel.
Having an understanding of your sales funnel will also highlight the points at which your target audience are dropping out and failing to convert. This valuable information will allow you to put a plan in place that helps prevent potential losses.
Each stage of the customer journey requires a different approach from the marketing activities if they want to move customers smoothly down the funnel. The last thing you want to do is incorrectly message customers at the wrong time.
So, with that in mind, let’s take a look at a typical five-stage experience that your customer might take with your brand. From the initial awareness stage to becoming a loyal, paying customer:
1. Awareness
It is likely that your target audience has never heard of your company before, or of the products or services you offer at this very first stage.
This is the point where your prospective customers are realising they have a problem and educating themselves around it through research.
At this initial stage online search through “Google”, is the first point of call and customers find themselves typing various things into the search bar in order to find help. Therefore with online search being so critical its important that
Marketing Strategy Essentials – PEST Analysis
PEST is an acronym that stands for Political, Economic, Social, and Technological (analysis). PEST analysis is used to assess these four external factors in relation to your own company.
In order for your marketing strategy to run smoothly and be as successful as possible, it is vital to understand any opportunities and/or threats in both the current market and the wider environment. Carrying out a thorough PEST analysis will enable you to better understand the market trends and conditions, as well as helping to identify the expected constraints on your strategy.
You only have to think about Covid and Brexit to see how two of these factors can massively impact on your business.
Political Factors
Whilst we cant control tax policies, tariff & trade restrictions, employment laws, environmental regulations, consumer protection laws, , copyright, advertising regulations, political stability of a country, etc. The best thing you can do is to make yourself aware of anything that could impact your marketing performance and adhere to the rules to avoid any major penalties or backlash.
Economic Factors
Understanding the current economic climate is important for marketers in order to have a better grasp of the factors that affect consumer buying power these factors include, Economic growth indicators, inflation rate, interest rates, exchange rates, fiscal policies, unemployment trends, etc.
These factors have a direct impact on the cost of your products or services. At the time of writing container shipping costs have increased by a factor of 5 so from paying £2000 for a container costs are over £10,000. By factoring in the economics of your target market when developing your marketing strategy, you can be prepared for any ramifications as a result of an economic change.
Social Factors
Since the issues of the Coronavirus there have been many social factors that have impacted on business. Traditionally social factors included cultural aspects, age distribution, career attitudes, health consciousness, population growth rate, social classes, etc.
By digging deep into the social factors impacting your target audience, (remember this can equate to chooser, user , payer) a business can identify how a consumer’s needs are shaped and what brings them to the market to make a purchase.
Technological Factors
Technology has a huge impact on businesses on so many levels and can either be an addition that is welcomed or shunned. Think about how businesses have developed over Covid and from a basic level have had to embrace Zoom and Teams. When developing your marketing strategy, it’s important to be aware and keep up-to-date with all the latest technological advancements that might improve your operations and add value to your customers.
PEST analysis can be extended to become the ‘PESTEL’ analysis, incorporating ‘Environmental’ and ‘Legal’ factors
Environmental factors – Avoid Greenwash
Environmental factors and sustainability are more dominant now than they have ever been. B2B and B2C consumers are more educated on environmental matters and the impact that global production and trade can have on the wider environment.
Environmental factors such as sustainability, waste management, recycling procedures, etc, of their production and distribution, all have to to be considered. This ultimately impacts on the business and various aspects of their marketing strategies.
Legal factors
The law remains an important aspect of any business in order to facilitate successful and ethical trade, although legal factors often overlap with political factors. Trading internationally can bring about issues as many countries have their own sets of rules and regulations, however, many countries abide by the same or similar legal regulations. By not considering legal factors when creating your marketing strategy, you run the risk of harming, or even destroying, the entire brand. A recent example of this is CE Marking post Brexit.
The UKCA (UK Conformity Assessed) marking is a new UK product marking that is used for goods being placed on the market in Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland). It covers most goods which previously required the CE marking, known as ‘new approach’ goods
Marketing Strategy Essentials – SWOT Analysis
The acronym SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This established method of analysis is the primary way that businesses position themselves and determine how aligned they are with their vision, goals, growth objectives, and success KPI’s. A SWOT analysis can be used for any number of different things such as a marketing project, a sales campaign, a new business case
Internal aspects of your business, which are essentially the things you have control over are referred to as your strengths and weaknesses.
External elements that you cannot control, like the actions of your competitors or the condition of the wider market are considered as opportunities and threats
SWOT analysis when completed correctly offers business insights that focus on both internal and external impacting factors. Conducting this type of analysis in detail and honestly heightens your chances of success and reduces the likelihood of failure. When completed as a token exercise it can be converted into SWAG Stupid Wild Arse Guesses ( Thanks to Professor Malcolm McDonald for the SWAG version)
How to conduct a SWOT Analysis for your business
- Strengths – what do you do well
- Weaknesses – what do you need to improve
- Opportunities – what are your goals
- Threats – what challenges do you face
Marketing Strategy Essentials
For more information on marketing click here
For other marketing articles see below
- Website Design Criteria – Information on site speed, responsiveness, branding, competition and conversion
- The Top 19 Benefits of SEO – find out if people are searching for your products or services ( and if they are capture them)
- Web marketing SEO – see how search optimisation helps you maximise your sales and marketing ROI
- Web marketing benefits – find out how and why web marketing is relevant to you
- Website marketing guide – a comprehensive guide to website marketing including why you need a website marketing strategy
- Should you put prices on your website – types of pricing pages and how to start planning your pricing page
- Website design crucial stages – the 4 key steps to a high performing website
- Website marketing plan – how to create a website marketing plan for your new site
- Website marketing techniques – website seo, using Google local business, the importance of linking and quality content
- Website marketing strategies – baah baah – don’t be sheepish in this article we look at correctly executing website marketing strategies
- Top 5 small business website marketing tips – if you have a small business this is a must read article