Building a marketing strategy – In-Depth Guide

Building a marketing strategy: Now that we understand our business and our customer, it’s time to identify how we’re going to go about our online marketing.

How Building a marketing strategy

So, you may have noticed a pattern in our previous examples. Each strategy builds on the strategy that proceeds it and, each time, we get even more specific.

Our marketing strategy will actually be many individual plans, each tailored to one goal for an audience segment we specify.

To help put that into perspective, let’s review another table. Earlier, you identified an audience of 24 to 35-year-old females interested in fitness. And one of our business goals for that audience was to sell Health & Fit Sport Nutritional supplements.

So, our first marketing strategy will be focused on this goal as it relates to that customer segment. And, from here, we’re going to look at all the channels we intend to market on, and then develop a marketing idea for each of the medias available to us: paid, earned, and owned.

Now, at this point, you might not have a sense of all the channels you can use and that’s okay.

For this audience, I anticipate marketing on Facebook, Pinterest, and the Health & Fit Sport blog.

For our paid media, we’ll identify what we intend to do under each channel.

In this case, Health & Fit Sport will run ads relating to their supplements on Facebook and pay for sponsored links back their blog from a major fitness website.

Now, not every channel has to participate in each medium. In this example, we’re not doing any paid media on Pinterest and that’s okay.

Next, do the same for your earned media. Because this is our organic effort, we’re really identifying what we’d like to see happen.

We might need to leverage the efforts in paid and owned to influence our earned media. Here, Health & Fit Sport  will aim to see viral campaigns. And in an effort to help encourage blog distribution, we’ll be adding share links and questions in their articles to inspire conversation.

Finally, make note of what you can do with your owned media as it relates to each channel. This might be as simple as posting on Facebook or it might involve a complex email campaign. Remember, online marketing is an iterative process and you’ll work to continuously improve upon these ideas. As you build out a new audience, new objectives, and new channels, you’ll wanna make sure you have coverage with your marketing strategy.

It’s important to be flexible. As you collect more and more data, you’ll be able to get closer and closer to your real targets. You may also learn that your plan was too aggressive or maybe it’s even too conservative.

There is a lot to think about when you build your marketing strategy. Spend time doing research to further understand your business, your customer, and the marketing channels available to you.

You may choose to implement all of the strategies available or you may choose to ignore a few.

Both are valid options, depending on what you’re setting out to do. All in all, your marketing strategy is the final piece of this puzzle. Build it last and revisit it often.