7 Steps to Create a Complete Marketing Strategy in 2022

The reality is, maintaining with advertising tendencies might be a full-time job.

In 2022 alone, we have seen a serious shift to short-form video content material; the rise and fall of latest platforms ( you, Meta); and the persevering with influence of the worldwide pandemic. In brief, what labored on your advertising technique previously may not fly in the present day.

To achieve the fast-paced advertising world — and keep a way of relevance together with your viewers — it is important to remain forward of the curve. 

To assist ease a few of that uncertainty, we have created this information to indicate you step-by-step the way to create a advertising technique that leaves no stone unturned.

Let’s dive into the crucial elements of an entire advertising technique in 2022, adopted by some examples for inspiration.

The Significance of Buyer-Pushed Advertising and marketing Technique Steps

A sturdy advertising technique will attain your target market – this consists of those that have by no means heard of your model all the way in which to repeat clients.

With no outlined technique, you’ll basically be throwing issues to the wall to see what sticks. And it’s costing you value, time, and assets.

A advertising technique will:

  • Align your group to particular objectives.
  • Allow you to tie your efforts to enterprise targets.
  • Let you establish and check what resonates together with your target market.

There are seven key steps to crafting a profitable advertising technique: Construct your advertising plan, create your purchaser personas, establish your objectives, choose the instruments, overview your current assets, audit and plan media campaigns, and lastly, execute your technique.

Let’s get into the small print of every step within the subsequent part. Or you may leap to the part you are most inquisitive about.

1. Construct a advertising plan.

Wait, I’ve to make a plan for my technique? What is the distinction?

Your advertising technique offers an outline of the explanation why your advertising group will want sure assets, take sure actions, and set sure objectives over the yr. Your advertising plan is the particular actions you will take to attain that technique.

Unsure the place to start out? This free marketing plan template can help.

marketing-strategy-template-free

Download for Free

The right template can help you build a marketing plan that identifies your budget for the year, the initiatives your marketing organization needs to tackle, and the marketing channels you’ll use to implement those initiatives.

Plus, it’ll tie everything back to a business summary, to keep you aligned with overarching company goals.

2. Create buyer personas.

If you can’t define who your audience is in one sentence, now’s your chance to do it. A buyer persona is a snapshot of your ideal customer.

For example, a store like Macy’s could define a buyer persona as Budgeting Belinda, a stylish working-class woman in her 30s living in a suburb, looking to fill her closet with designer deals at low prices.

With this description, Macy’s Marketing department can picture Budgeting Belinda and work with a clear definition in mind.

Buyer personas have critical demographic and psychographic information, including age, job title, income, location, interests, and challenges. Notice how Belinda has all of those attributes in her description.

You don’t have to create your buyer persona with a pen and paper. In fact, HubSpot offers a free template you can use to make your own (and it’s really fun).

You can also use a platform like Versium, which helps you identify, understand and reach your target audience through data and artificial intelligence.

Buyer personas should be at the core of building your strategy.

3. Identify your goals.

Your marketing strategy goals should reflect your business goals.

For example, if one of your business goals is to have 300 people attend your annual conference in three months, your goal as a marketer should be along the lines of boosting online registration by 10% at the end of the month to stay on track.

Other marketing goals might be to increase brand awareness or generate high-quality leads. You might also want to grow or maintain thought leadership in your industry or increase customer value.

Whatever your goals, identify what they are and how your marketing organization can work to achieve them over the next year.

4. Select the appropriate tools.

Once you have your goals identified, make sure you have the right tools to measure the success of those goals.

Online software like social media schedulers gives you analytics to help you keep track of what your audience likes and doesn’t. Alternatively, you might consider Google Analytics to measure blog and web page performance.

Additionally, make your goals SMART – to do so, take a look at How to Write a SMART Goal [+ Free SMART Goal Template].

Here are a few tools that can help you track and measure the success of your marketing goals:

HubSpot Marketing Hub

The Marketing Hub allows you to consolidate all of your marketing tools into one centralized platform.

hubspot marketing hub dashboard

Too often, you’ll find a tool that’s powerful but not very easy to use. With this tool, you can attract users with blogs, SEO, and live chat tools. You can then convert and nurture those leads through marketing automation, the landing page builder, and lead tracking features.

With custom reporting and built-in analytics, you can analyze your data and plan out your next move. Plus, HubSpot Marketing Hub integrates with over 500 tools.

Pricing: Free; Starter, $45/month; Professional, $800/month; Enterprise, $3,200/month.

Trello

trello-for-marketing-planning

Trello keeps your marketing team on track and openly communicating about the projects they’re working on. Create boards for individual campaigns, editorial calendars, or quarterly goals.

Built-in workflows and automation capabilities keep communication streamlined, and simplicity keeps your marketing team focused on the work that matters.

Pricing: Free; Standard Class, $5/month; Premium Class, $10/month for 100 users; Enterprise, $17.50/month for 250 users.

TrueNorth

truenorth-softwareTrueNorth is a marketing management platform built to help you hit your marketing goals. Built specifically for marketing teams, TrueNorth turns your marketing strategy into a visual projection of your growth, which is used to create monthly milestones that help you stay on track.

One of the key benefits of TrueNorth is that it centralizes all of your ideas, campaigns, and results in one place, with everything tied back to your goal.

Pricing: $115/month (free for 30 days).

Monday.com

monday.com hubspot integrationEverything on Monday.com starts with a board or visually driven table. Create and customize workflows for your team and keep groups, items, sub-items, and updates synced in real-time.

You can also transform data pulled from timeline and Gantt views to track your projects on Monday.com and ensure deadlines have been met. Plus, with more than 40 integrations — from SurveyMonkey to Mailchimp and, of course, HubSpot — you can visualize your data and ensure your whole company is collaborating.

Pricing: Basic, $8/month/seat; Standard, $10/month/seat; Pro, $16/month/seat; Enterprise, contact for pricing.

SEMrush

semrush dashboardSEO continues to be a huge factor in the successful ranking of your website.

SEMrush allows you to run a technical SEO audit, track daily rankings, analyze your competitor’s SEO strategy, research millions of keywords, and even source ideas for earning more organic traffic.

But the benefits don’t stop at SEO. Use SEMRush for PPC, building and measuring an effective social media strategy, content planning, and even market research.

Pricing: Pro, $119/month; Guru, $229/month; Business, $449/month.

Buzzsumo

buzzsumo marketing strategy tool

BuzzSumo allows you to analyze data to enhance and lead your marketing strategy, all while exploring high-performing content in your industry.

Use the platform to identify influencers who may help your brand reach, monitor comments, and find trends to make the most of every turn.

As your needs evolve, you can also leverage their crisis management and video marketing tools.

Pricing: Plus, $179/month; Large, $299/month; Enterprise, contact for pricing.

Crazy Egg

crazyegg website optimizationNeed to optimize your website this year? Consider getting started with Crazy Egg. You’ll be able to identify “attention hotspots” on your product pages, track ad campaign traffic on your site, and understand if shoppers are clicking where you want them to.

You can even make sure your “Buy Now” buttons are in the best place.

Crazy Egg also offers recordings, A/B testing, and more to help ensure your website is offering the best user experience.

Pricing: Basic, $24/month; Standard, $49/month; Plus, $99/month; Pro, $249/month; Enterprise, contact for pricing.

5. Review your media.

Decide what you already have in your arsenal that can help you create your strategy. To streamline this process, think of your assets in three categories – paid, owned, and earned media.

  • Paid media means any channel you spend money on to attract your target audience. This includes offline channels like television, direct mail, and billboard to online channels like social media, search engines, and websites.
  • Owned Media refers to any of the media your marketing team has to create: pictures, videos, podcasts, ebooks, infographics, etc.
  • Earned media is another way to say user-generated content. Shares on social media, tweets about your business, and photos posted on Instagram mentioning your brand are all examples of earned media.

Gather your materials in each media type and consolidate them in one location to have a clear vision of what you have and how you can integrate them to maximize your strategy.

For example, if you already have a blog that’s rolling out weekly content in your niche (owned media), you might consider promoting your blog posts on Twitter (paid media), which customers might then reTweet (earned media). Ultimately, that will help you create a better, more well-rounded marketing strategy.

If you have resources that don’t fit into your goals, nix them. This is a great time to clean house and identify gaps in your materials.

6. Audit and plan media campaigns.

Cleaning house segues straight into this step. Now, you must decide which content is going to help you.

Focus on your owned media and marketing goals. For instance, will updating the CTAs at the end of your blog posts help you increase RSVPs to your event?

Next, look at your buyer personas. Let’s say you work for a video editing software company. If one of your persona’s challenges is adding clean sound effects to their videos but you don’t have any content that reflects that, make a 15-second demo video for Instagram to show how great your product is at solving that challenge.

Finally, create a content creation plan. The plan should include topic clusters, goals, format, and channel for each piece of content. Be sure to include which challenge it’s solving for your buyer persona.

For ideas on content creation or a more in-depth look at how to create a content plan, check out our post, The Ultimate Guide to Content Creation.

7. Bring it to fruition.

At this point, your market research and planning should help you visualize how your strategy will be executed – and by which teams.

The final step is to bring that all together and assign actions to your plans.

Create a document that maps out the steps you need to take to execute your campaign. In other words, define your strategy.

Think long-term when creating this document. A standard strategy document is 12 months. This structured timeline should be the home base for your strategic marketing efforts.

To paint an example, let’s go back to the video software company.

Maybe in January, you will launch a software update that improves the exportation process for users. In April, you want to publish an ebook that explains editing terms to your buyer personas, and in September, you plan to launch an integration with other software.

Remember, your digital strategy is unique to your business, so the document should be as well. As long as the strategy includes the pertinent details outlined in previous sections, you’ll be set.

Now that we’ve explored the critical steps of a complete marketing strategy, let’s look at some “Why didn’t I think of that?” strategies to inspire your own.

Examples of Successful Marketing Strategies

1. Regal Movies

Digital strategy: Owned media

Regal Movies took the Halloween spirit to a new level, even renaming its Twitter account to reflect the spirit of the season. This “Monster Madness” poll is a fun, interactive way to get followers invested in Regal’s content:

regal movies' owned media

Image Source

Regal’s tweet is an instance of owned media as a result of the corporate was in full management of the solutions followers gave (and, apparently, American Werewolf did not stand an opportunity).

Regal successfully saved true to their model through the use of solely traditional films of their ballot whereas nonetheless placing a contemporary spin on it.

That is additionally instance of how retweets do not essentially equal success. Whereas 4 retweets aren’t that huge of a deal, take a look at the votes: 461. Which means there have been over 400 interactions with a single tweet.

2. La Croix

Digital technique: Consumer-generated content material, earned media

Consumer-generated content material is without doubt one of the finest methods to realize traction in your technique.

It demonstrates your appreciation for loyal clients, builds neighborhood, and likewise incentivizes different customers’ to advertise your merchandise for the possibility at an analogous shout-out.

Plus, generally the content material your model loyalists create is admittedly, actually good.

lacroix

Picture Supply

On this case, the buyer is praising the model’s product. Doesn’t get higher than a unbelievable overview like that.

3. Small Ladies PR

Digital technique: Occasion advertising

Wait, is that Keke Palmer?

olay

Picture Supply

Small Ladies PR is a boutique PR firm primarily based in New York, and one of many firm’s abilities is throwing superb occasions for his or her shoppers, like Olay. This occasion recap carousel on Instagram is an efficient occasion advertising instance, because it boosts consciousness on your model and gives social proof by that includes a public determine.

4. Superside

Digital technique: Paid media

Design company Superside launched an Instagram advert to advertise a lead magnet: Their digital advert design information. Whereas the model could have created the information particularly for paid promotions, it’s additionally doable that they repurposed a high-performing weblog put up right into a downloadable e book.

marketing strategy paid media example

On this case, all they needed to do was repackage their present content material, construct an advert round it with artistic belongings, and run it.

In earlier sections, we mentioned the facility of leveraging a number of types of media in your advertising technique. This can be a nice instance of it.

5. Goal

Digital technique: Paid media, Twitter playing cards

Should you’ve acquired the funds for paid media, take full benefit of it.

Paid media is while you pay social channels, like Twitter, to advertise your content material on their web site. By doing this, your content material reaches new audiences you may not have the ability to attain organically:

target marketing strategy example

Image Source

This inclusive advert from Goal about fall buying makes use of Twitter playing cards to advertise the model and make buying simple with the press of a button.

Extra social channels are providing methods for buyers to buy in-app or near it, driving gross sales and boosting publicity for manufacturers.

What to Count on After Following Your Advertising and marketing Course of Steps

Finally, creating an entire advertising technique is not one thing that may occur in a single day. It takes time, laborious work, and dedication to make sure you’re reaching your excellent viewers, every time and wherever they wish to be reached.

Keep it up (and use a number of the assets we have included on this put up), and over time, analysis and buyer suggestions will assist you refine your technique to make sure you’re spending most of your time on the advertising channels your viewers cares most about.

Editor’s be aware: This put up was initially revealed in October 2019. It has been up to date for freshness and accuracy.

New Call-to-action

Latest news
Related news

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here