HOW TO BUILD A SUCCESSFUL MARKETING STRATEGY
The impact that a solid marketing strategy can have on brand growth may seem obvious, but you'd be shocked at just how many brands fail to take the time to truly invest in building a strategic marketing plan. You’ve likely come across this phenomenon yourself: you start researching a brand that you might want to buy from or work with, only to discover that their marketing is a hot mess and you’re stuck wondering, “what’s going on here? Are they even still in business?!”
An outdated website, a smattering of social posts every few months, a lack of cohesion and consistency. The look & feel is all over the place, and it's unclear what the brand is aiming to achieve through their products or services, or what it stands for at all. Are they technically doing marketing? Yes, of course. But it's not strategic marketing. A marketing strategy requires more than just a sprinkle of different outreach techniques used inconsistently. Good, quality strategy requires forethought, planning, and intentionality.
The great thing about having a strategic marketing plan is that you can yield massive results with just a little effort. You don't need a degree in marketing or communications to create a kick-ass marketing strategy, and you don’t need to be on every single platform to boost your brand’s visibility and build brand awareness. So, before you draft an email or design a Pinterest pin for the heck of it, follow these five steps to build a successful, powerful marketing strategy for your brand.
Step 1. Establish Your Strategic Framework
Alright, mentally prepare yourself for a bit of soul-searching. Before we can even start discussing how to begin your marketing strategy, it's essential to get introspective and define who your brand is, what it provides to your audience, and how it differs from all the others.
To nail your marketing strategy, ask yourself (and more importantly, write down):
What are we doing that nobody else is doing?
What do we stand for? What is our mission and core values?
In one sentence, what do we provide for our potential customers?
Who is our ideal client? (Remember to think about who they are as humans, not just their demographics!)
What needs do our clients/customers have, and how are we meeting those needs?
Who is our competition, and how are we different from them?
Who are our industry allies or brands that are complementary to ours, and how can we collaborate with or support one another?
Ideally, you and your team should have a high-level brand strategy outline that discusses who you are, what role you fill in your industry, and how you differ from everyone else (AKA your unique value proposition), among other insights around how you’ll position your brand in the market. Your brand strategy outline is a living manuscript – it should be updated as your brand, team, and mission evolve, but it should also serve as the ultimate guide for how you present your brand. Not sure how to approach a specific issue in your marketing planning? Refer back to your brand strategy. Think of it as your north star!
Another essential part of your strategic framework is your brand identity. Your strategy outline talks about who you are. Your identity is all about how you want to come across to your current and potential customers. Identity includes voice, tone, the visual vibe (colors, fonts, aesthetics), and sharable assets like logos and letterheads. Brand identity is vital because nothing sabotages a cohesive marketing plan quite like messy, inconsistent visuals.
Many brand owners tend to feel as though they’re “too close” to their brand to develop a clear brand strategy, or don’t have the skills to design their visual indentity. Luckily, we can help with that!
Step 2. Engage in Market Research
Now you have a framework for who you are, but who is your audience? That’s where market research comes in… but a word of caution: market research is a massive topic and can get very complicated, very quickly. You could spend forever researching and get totally lost in the weeds without ever taking action, which is why it’s crucial to develop an intentional plan of approach. Not only that, but market research isn't something you do once and then never have to do it again. You’ll want to perform initial in-depth market research, then update your research at least every six months. It’s also crucial to perform market research when you’re the early stages of developing a new product or service – after all, you don’t want to put a ton of time, energy and money into an offer, only for it to flop because you assumed you knew what your audience needed, instead of actually researching what they needed.
How do you conduct market research? Start with your current clients. Who are they, how did they find you, and why did they pick you? The people currently engaged with your brand are a great indicator of your target audience because you know that your offers resonate with their needs. You can even outright ask them through surveys, emails, or directly when speaking to them. Remember to be intentional about how and when you choose to approach existing clients for market research purposes! Going overboard with emails and messages can put you into “sleazy salesperson” territory.
Next, look at your industry. What's happening in your niche, and what trends should you be aware of when attempting to connect with and build your audience? Sometimes, this is just as simple as grabbing a pen and paper and scrolling through social media and blogs, jotting down thoughts and insights as you come across them. If you want to take a more formal approach, sites like Google Trends, Statista, and AnswerThePublic are all great for gathering insights on trends within your industry and what your target audience is searching for.
Lastly, who is your competition, and what are they doing differently? When you’re performing competitor research, be mindful not to copy their strategies; instead, the point is to gain insight around what is and isn’t working for them from an outsider’s perspective. Take a look at how they present their brand visually, how their brand messaging is structured, and how their audience interacts with their content, as well as any publicly available insights on the brand’s performance within the market. . Knowing what your competition is up to can help you stay agile and reactive, but don’t let this deep-dive market research overwhelm you and prevent you from taking action. You’ll never be 100% sure, and you’ll always be learning, adapting and optimizing as you go.
Step 3. Do A Thorough Audit
Odds are, you already have a marketing presence. This can be a website, a social media account (or five), a Google Ads account, or an email list. Your marketing presence is anything you have in place, both digitally and offline, that helps you connect with current and potential clients.
And just because you're working on building a more cohesive marketing strategy doesn't mean you have to throw away everything you've been doing until now. In fact, quite the opposite: there's a lot to be learned from identifying what is and isn't working for your brand. What have you done that has been successful? Which of your marketing efforts converted to sales, generated new leads or email sign-ups, or got your audience engaged?
Follow these steps to do a thorough internal audit:
Compile your current marketing channels into one document or spreadsheet so you can start managing and monitoring them.
Gather all of your analytics from your different channels. Analyze them for trends and denote the campaigns, posts, and emails that did exceptionally well. Write down any insights that stand out to you. Some insights you’ll want to look at include reach, engagement, website traffic by channel, open rates, click-thru rates, and demographic insights on the people who are viewing and engaging with your marketing content.
Objectively examine your marketing channels to observe your brand as if you were a potential client and ask the following:
How is the brand presented? Is there a cohesive identity? Is there consistency across all channels? Does your website clash with your socials, for example, or do they work together congruently?
Is it obvious what your brand does and who it serves based on your bios, your visuals, and the content you put out? What areas of ambiguity can be patched up or made more clear?
Are you creating and distributing high-quality content on a consistent basis?
Are you following current best practices for each channel?
Are you giving clear calls to action when distributing marketing materials?
Is your content aimed at solving your prospective clients’ problems?
Ask a trusted associate or marketing professional to give you some perspective on your channels. Often, others can be more objective and see things with a critical eye.
Part of a successful audit is turning off your emotions and viewing your successes and failures analytically. Entrepreneurs frequently get into the “sunk-cost fallacy” mindset when attempting to optimize their marketing strategy. They stick with things because they've already invested so much time and energy into them – even if those things aren’t working. But remember, growth and progress require a certain level of discomfort and brutal honesty.
Similar to developing your brand strategy, auditing your current marketing approach might seem daunting when you're so deeply immersed in your business. On the other hand, that’s kinda our jam here at Sonder Social, so hit our line and we’ll put our marketing brains to work to give you a fresh perspective on your brand.
Step 4. Create A Content Pillar Framework
Now that you've taken a high-level look at your brand strategy and marketing channels, gathered insights, and made improvements, it's (finally!) time to develop your content strategy. Following a structured content pillar framework can help you decide what you should distribute on your marketing channels and how it helps you achieve your overreaching brand goals, such as building brand awareness and engaging new potential clients. Without a framework, it’s easy to fall into the trap of posting whatever, whenever, which is not good for your brand (or your audience).
So, develop several pillars that align with your brand and the type of content you want to make. You should aim to put out more than just promotional content if you truly want to build a community through your marketing channels. A constant influx of sales-focused content can start to make your audience feel like they’re being chased by that annoying guy in the mall who desperately needs you to test out whatever random product he’s selling – yuck! Instead, take a human-centered approach and think about what types of content your audience may like to see, based on the research you’ve gathered about them. Does it make sense to share tips and how-to’s, engage people with humor, give insider insights, or be deeply authentic as an industry leader? All of the above? There's no “wrong” answer when creating the content framework, as long as it aligns with the insights and objectives you’ve laid out from the previous steps.
One approach to content pillars that we love and use with many of our clients is as follows:
Dedicate a pillar to emphasizing the emotional benefits your brand and its products/services provides
Dedicate a pillar to emphasizing the tangible benefits your brand and its products/services provides
Dedicate a pillar to your brand ethos – incorporating your why, your brand values, and your mission, in order to connect with your audience on a deeper level
Dedicate a pillar to delivering your brand’s take on recent trends, either in social media or within your industry
This approach can work for nearly every brand and helps you connect with both the emotion-driven and fact-driven buyers in your audience, establish authenticity and build trust, and keep your content fresh by incorporating what’s hot right now. However, remember to tailor your content pillars based on what makes the most sense for your brand!
Step 5. Build A Distribution Plan
Now that you've ironed out all the high-level details, the last thing to do is develop an editorial content calendar. The content creation & scheduling system you create will largely depend on the marketing channels you plan to use, the types of content you plan to create, and the volume of social media content and email content that you plan to push out. Are you going all-in on an organic marketing approach, or will you allocate some of your marketing budget towards paid ads? Will you have a regularly scheduled email newsletters? Is there a potential to gain earned media coverage by connecting with complementary brands, publications or industry figures?
No matter what route you take, it's crucial that you know when your marketing content will go out and who is responsible for it. This is often where most brands get stuck trying to create a comprehensive and consistent marketing strategy. You may know what you want to post, but that won’t matter much if you're not taking the time to create and schedule it in advance, ending up with major gaps in your posting frequency as a result.
Planning and scheduling your marketing campaigns should be done regularly, at least monthly, if not biweekly. Using software like Flick (we use this with all of our clients!) or Planable can help organize and automate social media scheduling. Flodesk and ActiveCampaign are great options for managing your email marketing, with Flodesk being more simple and user-friendly, and ActiveCampaign being more robust with useful features. However, the specific tools you use are less important than consistency and creating a system that works for you.
Need Help Building a Successful Marketing Strategy?
Marketing itself sounds pretty straight forward in theory – just plan, create, post and optimize… right? But the reality is that it takes a lot of time, energy and effort to do it right – time that you and your team may not have with so much else on your plate. That's why many brands & entrepreneurs – our clients included! – choose to work with a digital marketing agency instead of trying to tackle their marketing solo or incurring the (often massive) expense of hiring an entire marketing team. Instead, outsourcing to experts in the marketing field that have the inside scoop on industry approaches & best practices and the hands-on experience to streamline the process will save you tons of you time & effort, setting you up for success without the stress.
At Sonder Social, we take care of all the high-level strategic content planning, development, and implementation so you can focus on the bigger picture without spending hours (or days) on your marketing each week.
Wanna find out if we’re a match made in heaven? Check out our agency services, then drop us a line and let’s chat about how we can help your brand scale to its next level!
