Critical Components Of Strategic Marketing You Need To Know

A well-planned strategic marketing blueprint is every organization’s path to success. As the reference point for all of your marketing efforts, the plan touches upon the key components that are required to formulate a strategy that creates brand awareness, evokes demand for your product, and ultimately converts consumers.

Here are the key components that are a staple in every successful strategic marketing plan.

Current Market Analysis

To layout a framework that can help you reach your goals, you need to assess where you currently stand as an organization.

Your current market analysis will include an in-depth overview of prior marketing strategies (if any) and their performance, according to set KPIs. You need to evaluate what worked and what did not before you start planning. This will tell you exactly what strategies to adopt or avoid in the future.

The fastest way to gather data is to use tools like Hubspot or Google Analytics. These tools can help you answer essential questions about digital marketing efforts, such as the percentage increase in website traffic after you launched a campaign. In contrast, tracking the impact of conventional marketing strategies can prove to be complicated. One way to do this is to gauge the marginal increase in revenue after the campaign launched.

Organizational Marketing Goals

Every effort to promote your business should be in line with your organizational goals. You need to ensure your entire strategic marketing plan is in line with your values so that you present a coherent, cohesive, and consistent brand image. The ”positioning” aspect is a crucial component of your marketing strategy, and your team relies on these organizational goals and values to ascertain the vision and tone that audiences will see and hear.

Target Audience

Your target audience is the cornerstone of your strategic marketing plan and influences every component. After all, these are the individuals you want buying into and championing your brand. 

You should be able to identify the demographic that is most likely to have the particular pain points that your offering solves. Here, you’ll need to dig into extensive market research and develop what is known as a ‘buyer persona.’

But that’s not all; the ”target audience” component also includes details such as:

• The factors consumers find missing in your previous marketing efforts or that of your competitors’ marketing or product offerings. 
• Their buying decision process: Is there a consumer conversion funnel that you can map out?
• Their preferences: Have they expressed particular concerns over some aspects of your product or services?

Understanding your consumers lays the foundation for a successful strategic marketing plan. The more you can resonate with their pain points, the more likely you can pitch your offering as THE solution.

Advertising Strategy

You’ve outlined what you need to market (the product) and who you need to market to (the target audience). Now it’s time to work on the “how.”

Your marketing strategy is how you’ll reach out to your prospects – answering the all-important question: “How will I find and attract the buyers who are most likely to convert?”

Like every other component of your strategic marketing plan, your strategy is also dependent upon various elements such as the target audience, budget, and other factors. How you market inevitably depends on who you intend to market to, and how many resources you have available.

Ultimately, your plan should identify the appropriate traditional and digital advertising channels that you will use to implement your plan.

For this, consider the following questions: Would a direct mail marketing strategy earn you the most conversions, or should you add email marketing to the mix? Should you buy radio spots, or should you sponsor posts on Facebook?

Your advertising strategy lists the explicit details on the channels, the frequency of your advertisements, the overall costs, and others.

Monitoring & Measurement

Marketing without tracking the right metrics is guesswork. If you don’t have accurate data, how do you know what worked? How can you attribute a rise in revenue to your marketing and not a seasonal increase that occurs every year?

You need to define metrics, KPIs, and a timeline for implementation to keep your strategic marketing plan on track. Not only does this help provide you with a framework of expected results, but it also serves as a reference point on how to gauge them.

For instance, keep track of your website conversions and make a simple spreadsheet to compare your ROI against the budget invested in your digital campaigns.

When you analyze the results over a quarterly period, you’ll be able to identify successful strategies and single out tactics that require improvement.

A sound strategic marketing plan will give your organization the structure, goals, and measurements to grow and improve awareness, audience reach, and profitability.  Ready to get started? At C-Leveled, we help businesses create comprehensive strategic marketing plans that help guide better business decisions, and just plain better business. To learn more about how we can help your business grow, contact us today.