Apr 20, 2021

How to Develop a Marketing Strategy

Today, I'm boiling down the main components of launching an efficient marketing strategy to actionable nuggets of branding. If used correctly, these can reward you with a robust following, a more meaningful client-provider engagement, and a bundle of lasting leads.

You may brainstorm and upload super-duper material, but without a well-thought, strategic marketing approach your breakthrough and growth are lagging.

In this post, I'll be touching on:

What to include in your strategy
How to implement it properly to reach your desired targets

Before we dive into the above points, remember that your content marketing and business objectives work hand-in-hand to serve your customer's needs. What's the point in mapping out a strategy if it doesn't fulfil your aims and what your followers look for? If anything, it's customers who pay the bills not your side-splitting or catchy tweets.

Here are my tips to designing the ultimate master plan — one which will help you blossom in the digital garden steadily and effectively.

Assess your scope: Where are you now?

If you want to cement your brand loyalty, the triptych of “marketing strategy”, “business goals”, and “customer's needs” should always be in your mind. To start off, run your business through metrics to evaluate which areas are performing well, and what calls for improvement.

This way, you'll be aware of what you need to work on instead of striving to be a rockstar at everything. There's no need to let a 25-page cheat sheet languish within your website, when you’ve identified that brand awareness is a top priority for your business. Why drain yourself into setting or brushing up a vigorous social media presence when search visibility and enhanced organic web traffic is what you're after?

Albeit complex, 1-2 data-driven insights can knock a sense of direction into you, carving out a path for start-up business development.

AARRR Framework

The AARRR (pirate) framework — hence the reference — is an avenue to success. The funnel stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue, and helps monitor the lifecycle of each user's experience towards converting into loyal clients, brand ambassadors and trusted referrals.

Here's a rundown of the pirate metrics via a concrete example. Let's imagine that your business is smashing it when it comes to acquiring new customers; they sail through their journey in finding you, loading their baskets and purchasing your products or services. Upon further inspection, however, you notice that your retention is rock-bottom low. Simply put, they buy from you but are not tempted enough to come back.

Identifying the problem is invariably your starting point. Now that you know how to intrigue and turn your one-off customers into returning clients, you can make it your focus. This helps you come up with alternatives in your marketing to creatively approach the issue and resolve it.

Concretise your mission: Ask the WHY

Bravo my mastermind, you've just audited a large portion of your business' technical nature! Now what? At this point, it's worth spelling out what motivates you into creating content. To do so, be mindful of the language you use when articulating your mission statements. Lera Boroditsky's notion of linguistic relativity states that words, beyond their descriptive status, shape our perception of reality, if not reality itself.

So, aside the broad, “Everyone’s on social these days. I want that too”, ask yourself what your mission is. This will ground you and narrow down your ambitious plans to achievable chunks of content infused with purpose, value and integrity. Once you have your mission laid out, make it specific with on-point questions (and be brutally honest with yourself).

If your goals are attained, what will they look like?
Why do you want to implement different forms of marketing in your overall business strategy?
How are they going to benefit you and your audience in the long run?

There's a wealth of ways to apply a marketing strategy. But to avoid getting overwhelmed, pinpoint 1-2 overarching goals which complement your business system, and will help you navigate your creation process.

Once you have a rough idea, outline that measurable output which would constitute a professional triumph.

Rather than propositions like:

“I want more followers”,

set a particular goal that is quantifiable both in terms of numerical figures and timeframes.

That said, rephrase:

“I want to gain 100 new followers on Instagram each month”, or “By the end of the year, I will have reached 5 thousand subscribers on my YouTube channel”.

In this way, you hold yourself accountable, tracking your results and actions in a realistic and tactical way. Of course, this is just an example and your aspirations don't have to be follower-orientated .

Choose your KPIs

Once you have your mission in place, decide which metrics and stats will help you track your progress and trigger those algorithms. That's vital because how else will you test if the strategy is hitting your pre-designated goalposts? If you prioritise on engagement, you better focus on likes, comments, and shares that will give you an indication of your engagement rate. Likewise, if you're trying to attract more leads through your content, measure your conversion.

Upon settling on the KPIs that best work for you, consider the toolkit you could use to measure them, and how you can write performance reports for thorough analysis.

Define your Audience

Now, this is when things get tricky. If you're B2C, knowing your audience is a non-negotiable: you want to make sure you're talking to the right people, in the right mode, with the right message, at the right time and place. Sketching out your ideal audience ensures that you're not wasting your time and money on creating content that gets swallowed in a black hole. You need to make sure you're targeting people whom you can serve or value in one way or another. Let's explore the questions that can help you capture your people:

What are the demographics (sex, age, location, interests, tastes)?
What are their pain points and possible solutions they seek?
What platforms are they on?
How do they consume content?
How do they form their decision-making and buying habits?
What are they likely to be enticed by to boost sales?

The last thing you want is to be superficial here. Go in depth on who they are and observe if all of this is reflected and actualised in real life.

Once you have this foundation established, segment your audience depending on their consumer behaviours and demographics, e.g. professional men in their 40s interested in watches, but within this group these men can have very different purchase routines or ways to consume content, and you should figure out your industry or niche to customise your offerings and campaigns accordingly. Some are more likely to proceed to checkout after bonding with your brand and can be alerted via email marketing. Some others may buy more impulsively after seeing a recommendation from an influencer.

Google names these attitudes as ‘I-Want-To’ moments. Many of us encounter these moments several times throughout the day, and rather than asking a friend or leafing through an encyclopaedia for the answer (like we did in the olden’ days), we lean on our electronic devices, a.k.a extensions of our hand, to provide the info.

Such moments arrive in the variations of:

I-want-to-buy
I-want-to-do
I-want-to-know
I-want-to-go
I-want-to-try

But how do you even begin to mark out the ‘I-want-to’ questions your customers are asking? Well, you need to know who your customers are. Duh! How? (Fast forward to the next point that includes some potential client profiling).

Personas

To further secure a more personal connection and keep a clear vision on who these audiences are, create personas. Treat those as semi-fictive representations of who are your people based on the research you carried out. Then, tether different content types to them, but be as detailed and calibrated as possible. Through this, you won't devalue or idealise your target market.

At times, we tend to underestimate the know-how of our audience or expect them to understand mind-boggling buzzwords and notions. And finally, it's tempting to think that your audience is in fact you, but BREAKING NEWS: it's not. You may relate to them in a we-are-soulmates sort of way, but remember that they may behave very differently to you.

Low-key competitor stalking

Everything is a mashup, so rest easy you won't be penalised if you catch a sneaky glimpse at what your competitors have been up to. Observe their strengths and weaknesses. Comb through their landing page and blogs, their social pages and newsletter. Ask yourself how their brand voice and working model differ to yours – are they targeting a different audience, or are you missing a trick in their marketing kick?

Type their URL into Ahrefs or Buzzsumo to inspect what content is delivering for them in terms of links and social shares.

SEMrush is another powerful content weapon for analysing competitor material. It allows you to leverage the keywords they’re organically ranking for, and have peeks into the volume of traffic asking that specific question.

A cross-referencing against your own website can be useful in making informed decisions about how you can start to compete with them.

Structure types of content

Now that we have the fundamentals covered, you can begin to visualise content. With everything you've researched, think what distinct messaging you want to broadcast. What values and principles do you bring first? This is your reference point for all things content creation.

Act of speech

Next, comes the language you'll use to resonate with the particular segments of people. What tone and style will work best? Then, you'll find ways to set yourself apart from your competitors. What unique selling points that convey human emotion describe your brand? Nobody expects you to reinvent the wheel or revolutionise your field. All you need is a unique, sustainable perspective.

Networking

What 1-2 channels will you focus on at first. What are you good at — utilise the potential of your soft and hard skillset. Are you bubbly? Video or offline promotions like trade shows or conferences are your go-to. Are you a wordsmith? Blogging may be your calling. Be abreast of where your audience spend their time, and how they interact with content.

A word of warning: if you're just making your baby steps in the marketplace, it's luring to go overboard and be active on every single platform. Though, it's a myth that in order to scale your brand, you should be present in all existent social media channels. You can always expand as you move along if you have the capacity to do so.

Posting

What kind of posts are you sharing? Do you back them up with:

Infographics?
Ebooks?
Checklists?
Transcripts?

What genre?

Educational?
Informative?
Entertaining?
Inspirational?
Emotional?
Formal?

Ensure your design accords to your brand's visual identity too. If you're planning on posting inspirational quotes, keep the format consistent throughout. What colours/graphics/icons will you use for certain types of content? When inserting imagery in your content, what mood are you going for?

When crafting your content, apply the U.K.F.A.A system (no, these are not the initials for a war comrades association). They stand for:

Usability – readable and graspable content? Typos? Subheadings? In-text backlinks – too many/few?
Knowledge level – is it written in a way your personas will get?
Findability – Is the piece easy to navigate to?
Actionability – What is the reader encouraged to do next? Is there a strong CTA, i.e., call to action?
Accuracy – Have you used the most relevant and up-to-date data?

Filling market gaps

What content is missing out there? What are people searching for that they struggle to find? Determine your cornerstone content and set dates to plan and upload your follow-up chunks. You can also curate or repurpose other types of material through automisation, i.e., compressing long-form, complicated texts (e.g. white papers) to digestible morsels of information (e.g. captions). Then, turn to your clients and under the auspices of polls and Q&As on social apps, produce user-generated content.

Pick keywords and metadata

Research keywords! Find a combination of niche and generic keywords to organise your marketing content. Then, formulate a baseline of categories, tags, and hashtags. Say that you run a food blog. Your categories could be recipes, techniques of preparation, and culture, while your tags and hashtags could relate to ingredients such as oat milk, or dietary requirements like gluten free products.

Roadmap your strategy with a content calendar

And on to planning your content execution! Choose when you're writing to whom about what. It's easier now that you have audiences' behaviours worked out. Blend content types to keep it engaging, but plan ahead. Single out the particular timescales when your audience might be interested in a particular subject. For instance, you're offering gift vouchers — it might be wise to push some promotional and seasonal content around Easter.

That said, what holidays and occasions are fuelling particular behaviours for your audience? Perhaps, they need a value-guided nudge during this time — be it informative or more sales-y. What subjects are trending in particular months? (This may be counter-intuitive to streamlining original work, but you can always permeate content with your personality).

Remember that it's a storytelling process. If you have a content series in mind, launch it! When is best to put it out in the world, and what time slots are preferable to post it? Choose the frequency and add it on your calendar.

Also, allocate resources. Unless you're a solopreneur who undertakes the workload, think of your team and their roles in the content creation process. Who's creating? Who's conducting the research? Set out your resources from the get-go. You might consider implementing a tactic to store ideas for future use if the period doesn't permit releasing it. If you need tools, check out Asana, Trello, running ideas list in your inbox, or in a good ol' notebook.

How to distribute work

As mentioned above, your ideas mean nothing when they fall on deaf ears. For this reason, your content needs a strategic approach to distribute it methodically and reach the right audience at the right time. When are they spending their time? Is it worth showcasing your work on a Facebook group? Should you carry out PR practices to get media on-board and target influencers to promote your stuff?

Have a system of publishing to ward off pitfalls and ensure a seamless workflow. Outline it, write it, fact-check it, ensure it fits the strategy, publish, distribute, and personalise activities to market it for utmost reach.

Set reminders to post evergreen content after a particular time (e.g. a month or half a year after it was published). Also, take inventory of your content. You never know when past material will come in handy. With a simple, intuitive directory, a quick search with specific keywords can save you hours of back-and-forth hunting as you try to reference other pieces with a vague idea of which ones are actually useful.

Document it all

Data proves that marketers who have a documented marketing strategy are far more efficient both in terms of results and how they perceive their work. By having it all written down, you never lose sight of your objectives, which keeps you on the right trajectory instead of straying far afield.

In essence, it serves as a comprehensive guide for teams to refer back to and keep everything in check. Your creative mind may wander further and further until you find yourself in the middle of the online forest without knowing where to go or how to keep yourself anchored. Sometimes, an idea may be ground-breaking, but if it doesn't align with your brand goals or will not serve an audience, you better keep it locked in your mental drawer. Make a case by resorting to your document only if you have a valid argument against publishing it. Or it could help you tweak the original concept to match the strategy better.

Conclusion: Checking back frequently

Have systems in place to track your KPIs regularly. Schedule weekly/monthly get-togethers with your team to discuss what went well and what didn't, and, most crucially, what you've learned from it.

Assess your customer behaviour: introduce A/B test your headlines or photos, check how your sales funnels are doing. Are people bouncing on an area of your website? Fix it. If your clients are not engaging, activate and power them through by asking questions. Have you chosen the right channels? Check KPIs, analyse them to ensure you're not wasting your time and budget.

At the end of each cycle, optimise your actions. If you have a working marketing strategy, see how your processes can be improved.

Bottom line: Be proactive!

With all this data, you can refine your strategy based on who is in your audience and what appeals to them. Humanise your brand, get close to them, familiarise yourself with their preferences and insecurities, and you'll hit those marketing KPIs in no time!