A marketing strategy is your business’s battle plan that guides your future marketing efforts.
Having a marketing strategy is more crucial than ever. We’re swamped with new technologies, growth hacks, and “must-try” marketing tactics. A solid marketing strategy will help you to focus on things that really matter and execute them properly.
Let me repeat that in other words.
A marketing strategy helps you choose the right marketing tactics, like promoting your blog posts or creating an affiliate program. I need to make the distinction between strategy and tactics clear because you’ll often see people using these interchangeably.
In this article, you’ll learn how to develop a winning marketing strategy in five steps:
Have your market research data ready
Decide which segments you’ll target
Appeal to your target market with proper positioning
Choose a few brand codes to become distinctive
Set strategic objectives for the year ahead
Let’s dive into it.
1. Have your market research data ready
It’s crucial to build your marketing strategy on data, not assumptions. You’re probably not developing and launching a product into the marketplace without market research—or at least you shouldn’t be.
Market research is an essential part of marketing and a topic on its own. I won’t go too deep into this, but I’ll provide options to get the needed data. Remember that even cheap, quick, and imperfect market research is better than no research at all.
Here’s what you should have before developing a marketing strategy:
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
Qualitative market data
Quantitative market data
Market segmentation
Competitive analysis
Feel free to go with what you deem enough at the moment. You can always come back to the research if you lack data for setting up the strategy. I’m aware that getting all the data right away is off-the-table for many new businesses.
a) Qualitative market data
Qualitative data tells you the “why” behind all your market research numbers. It’s essential for understanding your consumers as it digs into their views, experiences, motivations, and feelings.
Traditionally, the best way to get such data would be via focus groups and interviews.
Focus groups typically consist of five to ten people that represent your potential customers. The group should be moderated by a professional who knows which questions to ask and how to get reliable and in-depth insights. It’s a great option to get the data but not the cheapest in terms of money and time.
On the other hand, I would suggest you go out and interview your (potential) customers in any situation. Even better, observe them in places your product is purchased, consumed, or discussed. Take notes on this unfiltered and unbiased information. If you have a SaaS product, you can also record and analyze sessions of your users.
Here’s an example excerpt from an interview-style survey we did with our customers a while back: