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Ever wondered how and where to place your focus to increase your revenue?! In this case, you should perhaps reconsider essential issues about your marketing strategies. That’s why in this article, we’re covering the ultimate guide to developing the best marketing strategy that will lead to your success. You will also find some inspiring marketing strategy examples in 2023.
The development and growth of any business require an effective marketing strategy with clear and concise steps. Implementing a well-developed strategy will indeed help you make considerable progress toward your goals over time. In this process, you can also use a CRO Tool to gather useful information about your target market and choose the best strategy according to their personas!
But, let’s address the elephant in the room: how can you develop the right strategy for marketing your company, especially if you have an insignificant advertising budget? If you’re keen to learn more, go ahead and read our article!
Now, let’s get started!
What Is Marketing Strategy
It refers to any activity, whether online or offline, that helps you get closer to your short-term or long-term strategic sales goal. Looking for an academic definition?! Well, digital marketing strategy is the assessment of specific goals that can be achieved through different channels.
Developing the proper marketing strategy enables you to achieve your business goals and consider available tools, such as market research tools, campaigns, and different channels on the way to these goals. But, keep in mind that it is different from a digital marketing plan!
Let’s take a look at how the two differ:
Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan: What Is the Difference
Although some experts use the two terms interchangeably, it is necessary to pay attention to both cases and know their differences.
According to the marketing strategy definition, it is the ‘why’ behind your efforts. You must have a marketing strategy because you need more revenue to support its growth, or more brand awareness to save loyal customers. While a marketing plan is a method by which you implement your strategy. it’s ‘how’ you execute the strategy.
The goal of a marketing strategy is to align your goals with your overall business objectives, while the goal of a marketing plan is to develop the specific steps you need to take to achieve your goals.
What Are the Most Effective Marketing Strategies
There are many different types of marketing strategies you can choose, depending on your business goals and needs. In this section, we’ll go through strategies that have already passed the test and are known as the most effective ones.
The following strategies contribute greatly to the success of your business:
#1 Digital Marketing Strategy
There’s no need to introduce digital marketing… It encompasses all online strategies, like SEO, CRO, Email marketing, influencer marketing, etc.
#2 Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is one of the most powerful strategies for increasing traffic and conversions. How does it work? Well, in this strategy the business owners use content to attract and convert potential customers.
In fact, in content marketing by focusing on the users’ needs and concerns, you must create useful content. These contents influence the behavior of users, lead them through the customer journey, and convert them into customers. In other words, in the content marketing strategy, instead of forcing people to buy, you guide the audience on their journey by producing useful, attractive, and entertaining content.
Content marketing is one of the best marketing strategies for 2 reasons:
- It places prospects in the sales funnel and converts leads into customers.
- It increases your brand awareness and credibility.
Content marketing is not just limited to blog posts, though. Podcasts, ebooks, infographics, videos, and webinars are other forms of content that will come in handy.
#3 Social Media Marketing Strategy
If you have ignored the immense power of social media, you have already lost the competition! This strategy is a must for most businesses and even more crucial for small businesses and start-ups. Because:
- Along with reducing marketing costs, it causes lead generation,
- It builds trust and credibility,
- It will enhance your brand awareness and increase the number of visits and incoming traffic,
- It’s an easy way to connect with customers on an emotional level.
#4 Email Marketing Strategy
You may think email marketing is deadwood. But, you’re dead wrong! It’s still a great approach to stay connected and interact with people who are already familiar with your business or product. In fact, email marketing is a powerful and cost-effective tool for generating and converting leads.
You may ask: What kind of email should we send to customers?
You can send new blog articles, newsletter offers like discount codes and important information to those who have registered their email.
#5 Event Marketing Strategy
Another suitable strategy to increase sales in B2B, as well as B2C businesses, is event marketing. If you’re looking for a short definition of this type of marketing, it can be said as follows:
Event marketing is hosting, sponsoring or participating in an event, conference, exhibition, seminar, etc. with the aim of introducing new brands or services and products and bringing in potential customers.
With the help of this strategy, you will not only foster a strong relationship with clients and other colleagues, but you will also attract all audiences who are interested in your niche.
#6 PR Strategy
Public Relations (PR) is like speaking for your brand. You don’t expect your business to grow and develop without communicating with the audience and similar businesses?!
Public Relations is the strategy that every business should use to establish communication and interaction with its audience and improve the overall image of the brand. It’s like using the media to increase awareness about product benefits or introducing a new product.
#7 SEO Strategy
A site that is not in the search results is simply useless! A high percentage of searches about products or services start on Google, and it takes less than a minute for the user to find the desired result.
That is why all businesses struggle to reach the first rank on Google!
Appearing among the first results on the search page is a time-consuming process. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) shortens this process. How does this type of marketing help? With the help of website optimization, your website will appear as one of the top results on the search results page and boost your traffic and sales rapidly.
What Are Marketing Strategy Components
By now, we all know the types of marketing strategies, it’s time to dive right in and learn more about marketing strategy components:
1. Marketing Mix
This is not a complicated concept at all. In fact, every business deals with different parts of the marketing mix. For example, pricing is one of the components as an issue that we all have to decide on in our own businesses.
Marketing Mix also known as the 4Ps of marketing includes Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. You might ask, what does knowing the marketing mix and its components do for us?
Well, the main purpose of marketing is to make customers aware of your products. A marketing mix is a set of factors that you can use to make the audience buy your services.
2. Marketing Objectives
You must outline your business desired goals before building your marketing strategy because your business objectives will construct other marketing strategy components, such as budget and content creation.
3. Marketing Budget
Lack of budget and financial resources can immediately derail your strategy. Firstly, you should estimate your budget and all your expenses very carefully and make sure that you don’t end up in debt.
4. Competitive Analysis
At this stage, competitors should be analyzed. You should consider that if a customer does not want to buy your product, what will be an alternative solution? Those solutions should be examined in terms of their strengths and weaknesses. You may have already known your competitors, but it’s still vital to identify them.
5. Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning (STP Information)
In this process, you’ll take 3 steps:
#1 Designing Buyer Personas (Segmentation)
If you don’t know who your target audience is, what they’re looking for, what their needs and expectations are, and who you’re talking to, then how are you going to influence them and get their attention?
Knowing the customer’s concerns, needs, interests, behavior, and goals, helps to create an effective strategy. By researching keywords, conducting surveys, checking social network statistics, and using behavioral analytics tools, you can design a credible buyer persona.
Why is it so important?! Because categorizing the audience with criteria such as age, gender, education, geographical location, purchasing behavior, etc., gives you a clear picture of and in-depth insights into your target market and the opportunities.
#2 Identifying And Targeting A Segment of Audience (Targeting)
After you’ve determined the available budget, and got familiar your audience; Now it’s time to target!
To clarify, you need to determine which segment of your target audience to target. It is at this stage that you determine in which way and through which channel you want to reach the target market and target audience. For example, you can target a market where competition is low and there is room for growth.
#3 Positioning Your Brand in Marketing
Positioning means finding a distinct position within the customer’s mind. Let’s think about it! There are so many companies on the market, many of which offer the same products and services, and promise similar results. So, why would a customer choose Company A over B? It’s obvious! Because company A placed a distinguishing position in the customer’s mind!
Therefore, you must focus on your main values and competitive advantages and map this information to create a marketing strategy. Now, think about that: What makes your brand stand out from your competitors!??
6. Content Creation
It is a key factor in digital marketing. Any message your brand sends can be referred to as content; from the “About Us” page to your website blogs and published e-books. Content converts your visitors into leads and improves your online presence. If you do your best in this stage, your conversion rate will be maximized!
7. Metrics & Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Without evaluating and measuring the success and effectiveness of the marketing strategy performance and results, you are simply beating the air! Therefore, the last section is dedicated to determining the performance indicators for evaluation.
Key performance indicators are a measure for evaluating a specific goal in a certain period of time.
The most important performance indicators that are usually used to evaluate the marketing strategy are: conversion rate, return rate, return on advertising cost, and the number of sales. Remember that, these metrics vary depending on your business goals!
Keep in mind that the steps should be carefully considered so that they can properly help formulate various types of marketing strategies.
7 Steps of a Marketing Strategy Process
Now, in this section, we want to introduce you to 7 steps of the marketing framework, to build a coherent and efficient strategy. Don’t miss out on this part!
Step 1: Create Personas for Your Target Customers
Firstly, you need to gain a clear picture of your target customers through market research and analysis. Creating a persona means that you know in advance who will most likely be your customer and actually guess the characteristics of your target customer. The purpose of creating buyer personas is to help you formulate a digital marketing strategy.
Step 2: Determine Your Marketing Goals
Your marketing efforts boil down to your objectives and the tactics you want to take to accomplish them. Your Business goals will affect your decision for marketing strategy. What is exactly your goal? Boosting conversion? Increasing traffic? enhancing your brand awareness?
Step 3: Conduct Market Research and Competitors Analysis
You need to analyze your target market and competing businesses to get succeed. To clarify, you must analyze social media, your competitors’ case studies, and your customers’ surveys to conduct fundamental market research.
Step 4: Determine Your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT)
The SWOT matrix, which is a combination of the four words Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, is a good technique to get a comprehensive view of opportunities and threats in your business. Analyzing these four factors in the strategy development phase is necessary for the growth of any business.
Step 5: Define Your Marketing Mix & Evaluate Marketing Channels
To determine the best marketing strategy, it is better to take a look at the 4Ps marketing mix model. As your business has different aspects, if all of them are managed correctly, the overall marketing strategy will also move in the right direction.
To wrap up, the 4Ps of marketing mix means to offer the right product (Product) at the right place and time (Place), with a fair price (Price), with the help of an effective sales program (Promotion). At this stage, you should determine what is the best way to distribute the product or service.
Step 6: Analyze Your Financials
At this stage, it is time to take measures to analyze the budget. The budget considered for various marketing efforts should be analyzed and clarified. You must analyze your marketing budget, and evaluate marketing ROI, customer acquisition costs, marketing operational costs, etc.
Step 7: Review and Revise to Evaluate the Effectiveness
In the last stage, it is necessary to review and revise. You must review all parts of the marketing strategy and evaluate its effectiveness. If it is found that parts of it are ineffective, you can remove or change your strategy.
Good job! You’ve finished the final step! 👏
Now, it’s time to take a quick look at some examples of digital marketing strategies. Ready?
Best Digital Marketing Strategy Examples
These are some effective examples of digital marketing strategies that provide you with plenty of inspiration for your own campaigns and help you to make an informed decision. Let’s see how successful marketing strategy examples prevent brands from failure in this competitive world!
1. Walmart: B2C Marketing Strategy Example
Walmart’s business model has made the retailer the largest supermarket chain in the United States. Wal-Mart’s business model strategy is based on four factors: low pricing, accessibility differentiation, bulk sales, and providing a superior and exceptional customer experience.
By surpassing competitors in price, Walmart maintained its leading position in the field of global retailing. Walmart’s iconic EDLC (Everyday Low Cost) and EDLP (Everyday Low Prices) strategies helped grow the company to become the largest supermarket chain in the world.
2. Coca-Cola: Brand Marketing Strategy Example
Coca-Cola’s branding efforts are unparalleled. Production of quality products, reasonable prices, and creative and continuous advertising have built a strong brand. Coca-Cola is a clear example of a company that has designed marketing strategies to be a well-known and popular brand all over the world.
But how did Coca-Cola achieve such a position among other brands and maintain this position for more than a century? This company also used the strategy of guerilla marketing and was able to be memorable by spreading the ‘happiness vending machine’.
3. Sephora: Word-of-Mouth Marketing Strategy Example
It is a cosmetics product brand, but what makes it stand out?! By conducting detailed market research, Sephora realized that many women are not fully satisfied with the products even after paying a lot of money.
By using loyalty programs with innovative tricks and generous rewards, this brand could provide plenty of incentives for customers . As a result, they were able to increase brand awareness through word-of-mouth marketing.
4. Nike: Influencer Marketing Strategy Example
You can’t find a lot of campaigns as successful as Nike’s “just do it” slogan. Despite the tough and very strong competition, Nike’s position is still unattainable. You may ask why? Using successful marketing strategies such as influencer marketing and partnering with athletes, Nike promotes certain values in marketing,
5. Border States Electric: B2B Marketing Strategy Example
Border States is known for delivering innovative products and supply chain solutions to the construction, industrial, and utility markets. While it has so many competitors within its niche, Border States promised to keep supply chain costs low without sacrificing quality and efficiency. This is one of the successful examples of B2B marketing strategies.
6. HubSpot: Content Marketing Strategy Example
HubSpot is a marketing company known for the term “inbound marketing.” It is one of the successful examples of a content marketing strategy. Their blog is designed to teach small businesses about inbound marketing in order to attract readers to the top of the funnel.
Their resource section includes an amazing library of eBooks, case studies, webinars, quizzes, and target middle to bottom-of-the-funnel visitors.
7. Koko Black: Social Media Marketing Strategy Example
This Australian chocolate company increases its brand awareness by using social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. This luxury chocolate company is one of the best examples of social media marketing strategy. But why? It didn’t have some extraordinary type of advertising. This company just promotes its products and the special ingredients of its luxury chocolate in pleasing and attractive infographics.
8. Early Settler: Email Marketing Strategy Example
This furniture retailer used email marketing to promote its products. We all know that people won’t read long advertising and promoting emails. So, they solved this problem by sending aesthetic photos with very little text to draw customers’ attention. Using this approach, Early Settler ensures that the audience will open the email and never forget it any time soon. Definitely worth an email!
Congratulations, now you know all you need to know about marketing strategy!
There is a big question though! As we mentioned before, for developing a marketing strategy, we must identify our target audience’s needs and expectations and create customer personas. But How can we make it possible?! how can we make the market research process easier?! Worry not, we have a solution! 😉
WatchThemLive: The Best Tool to Know Your Customers
WatchThemLive is a behavioral analytics and website visitor tracking tool that enables you to observe and analyze your target market audience by using impressive features like session recordings, heatmaps, goal tracking, and website analytics.
With the help of this service, you can know your target audience’s needs and choose the best type of marketing strategy to improve conversion. If you’re looking for straightforward data to analyze and reach your website visitors’ behaviors, sign up now and take full advantage for FREE!
WatchThemLive Features
Did you know that by using WatchThemLive analytics capabilities, you can attract more users and boost conversion?! Here’s a list of its impressive services that make it possible:
WatchThemLive’s Analytics Dashboard
By using this service, you can gain in-depth insights into your visitors’ behavioral patterns to create their persona. On WTL dashboard, you can get access to data like the number of your website visitors, its traffic referrers, page views, and more.
It also enables you to analyze your website traffic, and figure out which content on which page gets the most traffic, or from what traffic channel you receive the most number of visitors. So you will understand which channel needs more attention and which content needs improvement in content marketing.
WatchThemLive’s Session Replays
Do you want some visual information rather than all the numerical data?! Well, this service compiled both quantitative and qualitative data to help you out. Its session replay feature captures all your visitors’ interactions on your website from their clicks to mouse movement and documents their UX in video format.
Besides, it offers a console error that warns you whenever they face an error in their journey. Why are you waiting then?! Sign up now and see what your visitors do on your website and make their personas!
WatchThemLive’s Heatmaps
Do you want to see the click path of your website visitors?! Are you keen to know what they expect and what your website bugs are?! WatchThemLive’s click heatmaps will track and analyze all users’ clicks on a mouse curser or tabs on the screen on a particular webpage.
When you find the elements on your webpage that are(not) working well, you can improve and redesign the webpage to deliver seamless UX and increase the conversion rate.
If you’re curious to learn more about its feature, Sign up today and give it a try for free!
We’ve learned a lesson here! You must conduct target market research thoroughly, and don’t guess who your audience is and what they expect and need. If you use a behavioral analytics tool like WatchThemLive you will make an informed decision based on your target market statistics data and won’t develop a marketing strategy based on your imagination or because you think it looks cool! 😉
Now, let’s see what people also search about this matter!
FAQs on Marketing Strategy
So far, we tried to explain everything to you completely. In this section, we will answer some frequently asked questions regarding marketing strategy!
1. What Are the Benefits of Developing a Marketing Strategy?
Here’s a list of some of the advantages of choosing a strategy for your business:
- It defines your workflow,
- It will help you to increase brand awareness,
- Another advantage of digital marketing strategy is that it is scientific and based on research rather than your instincts,
- All parts of your business are required to perform based on the vision of the company,
- You can reach your goals by using a strategy. Maybe your goal is to increase traffic, or maybe you want to focus on increasing sales. Digital marketing strategy helps you to move towards your goals in a smoother way.
2. What Are 3 Types of Media in Marketing?
In the marketing world, you must know what channels you have for digital marketing. Collect every channel you have in a spreadsheet. Now you have an overview of the media available to you. These media are divided into three categories, including:
Owned media is any digital asset that is specific to your brand; Such as the website, the Instagram account you have, the blog you write in, and any other digital tool you have access to.
Earned media refers to credit that you have earned through word-of-mouth marketing. This media may be your PR work, content you’ve published on your blog mentioning your brand, or a customer’s satisfying experience.
Paid media are those media where you have to pay a fee to be seen in them. This category includes tools like Google Ads, sponsored posts on social networks, banner ads on websites, TV ads, or any other tool that works with this system.
3. What Are the Most Practical Digital Marketing Strategies?
As we’ve already mentioned, each business requires a different strategy according to its own conditions, goals, budget and etc. But to get an idea, you can start by reading these strategies:
- Content marketing by publishing blog content on your website,
- Video marketing on YouTube,
- Social media marketing on Instagram,
- Audio marketing by creating podcasts.
To Wrap Things Up
In this article, we defined marketing strategy and gave you the 8 best marketing strategy examples. A digital marketing strategy is one of the most important elements you need to get started on. But, choosing the best type of marketing for your business is tied to your resources and budget, your target audience, and your strengths.
If you’re eager to conduct market research on your target audience, sign up on WatchThemLive right now and take full advantage of its services!
