How to create a winning Marketing strategy in 5 steps

1. Have your market research data ready

It’s crucial to build your #marketingstrategy on data, not assumptions. 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 #marketingstrategy:

qualitative market data

quantitative market data

market segmentation

competitive analysis

2. Decide which segments you’ll target

The second step in developing a #marketingstrategy is to decide which segments of the market you’ll go after. If you’ve done a good job with your segmentation, your target segments tend to be pretty obvious and easy to choose.

To choose your target segments, ask yourself these six questions:

Does your product align with what the segment wants?

Does it bring you the most value if you increase your market share there?

Do you have the sales and marketing resources to increase your market share there?

How difficult is it going to be to increase your market share there?

Does this segment influence any other segments? If so, how?

What are the trade-offs if you shift your focus on new segments?

3. Appeal to your target market with proper positioning

Positioning is how your target market should perceive your brand. It’s the intended brand image that consists of associations people have with your brand and products. Positioning allows you to differentiate from your competitors, and in some cases, even influence how the target market perceives your competitors.

When you think about positioning, you need to take into account these three aspects of it, also known as 3 cs of positioning:

Company

Customers

Competitors

4. Choose a few brand codes to become distinctive

A brand code, aka distinctive asset, is anything that you use consistently in your communications. You can think about it as your sidekick to positioning.

The most common brand code is your logo and visual style.

Your brand codes should be unique, which makes you distinctive, and ideally famous, which enables your existing audience to connect the dots easily.

5. Set strategic objectives for the year ahead

You need clearly defined marketing objectives to guide your marketing efforts and provide benchmarks for evaluation. It’s all that’s left to do for your strategy now.

Your marketing objectives should align with the widely-used smart criteria:

Specific— clearly stating the desirable outcome, answers “who, what, when, how much, …”

Measurable— you must be able to track progress with key performance indicators (kpis).

Achievable— be bold with your goals, but also realistic; use current growth as a benchmark.

Relevant - does the objective align with your overall marketing and business strategy?

Timely— set up a time frame for achieving the goal.

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