How to create the perfect marketing strategy

SIGN UP TO THE DIGITAL STRATEGY NEWSLETTER

 

Marketing is an all-encompassing term, referring to any action an organisation takes to attract an audience to their product or services. It refers to the acts of promotion, raising awareness, strengthening loyalty to your cause or brand, and demonstrating the value of your services.

 

A marketing strategy is the act of planning your marketing. A successful marketing strategy helps to attract a new audience, extend your reach, boost engagement, improve brand awareness, and so much more. They give you an advantage over others, positioning your organisation in the right place and highlighting your unique selling points.

 

Marketing strategies provide greater insights, allowing you to gather and analyse customer data and build future marketing based on such insights. They improve adaptability and agility, ensuring that you can effectively respond to market and user demands.

 

And they are cost-effective: well-planned marketing strategies help organisations to allocate resources, reducing needless expenditure and improving overall return on investment (ROI).

 

In short, marketing strategies are essential for effective marketing, regardless of the shape and size of your organisation. So, with that in mind, the present article offers a step-by-step guide to creating a brilliant marketing strategy.

 

We explore, among other things, how to keep up with the latest marketing trends, how to audit your current marketing outputs, the best ways to set effective goals, the actions that can help you meet such goals, and so much more.

 

Let’s start by taking a quick look at the benefits of an effective marketing strategy. 

 

Skip to: Understand the benefits of an effective marketing strategy

Skip to: Learn the latest marketing stats, trends, and theories

Skip to: Audit your current marketing outputs

Skip to: Track your marketing capacity and resources

Skip to: Define and refine your marketing strategy goals

Skip to: Ideate and think about marketing actions

Skip to: Actually write your marketing strategy

Skip to: Review, revise, and re-write your marketing strategy

 

 

Understand the benefits of an effective marketing strategy

 

A marketing strategy is a centralised place to define the driving forces behind your all of your marketing. It helps you to effectively plan, to note your points of success and areas of improvement, to understand the needs of your users, and to generally stay ahead of the curve.

 

A well-executed marketing strategy brings myriad benefits. Below we explore these benefits in detail, giving you a sense of what you can expect from a fully realised strategy.

 

 

Improves overall brand awareness 

 

Brand awareness is essential for all organisations. It plays a crucial role in success, building familiarity around your brand, reinforcing a sense of trust, and encouraging users, customers, and donors to return. Strong brand awareness increases loyalty and ultimately leads to success.

 

A marketing strategy is the best way to boost brand awareness. Marketing is how you stand out from the crowd, how you ensure your voice is heard amid the noise.

 

Adverts, content marketing, social media marketing, influencer marketing, public relations, partnerships and sponsorships – all of these forms of marketing help to boost your brand. And all of these forms of marketing are improved through a marketing strategy.

 

 

Boosts audience engagement and impact

 

Engagement should be an objective for all organisations, regardless of shape and size, because it allows more people to find out about your mission, your vision, your cause, your values.

 

Effective digital marketing ensures not simply that you reach more people, but that you reach the right people, the people who will engage and benefit from your organisation.

 

In short, marketing allows you to have a greater impact on a greater number of people. The strategy will help you to establish your user needs, as we’ll discuss below, and plan the best ways to meet those needs. It will help you define and refine the way in which you market your service, ensuring that you are heard by the right people at the right time.

 

 

Helps to raise funds and onboard volunteers

 

Increasing visibility puts your organisation in front of fresh eyes, people you would not typically consider as your target audience. With raised awareness comes more people visiting your site, more people looking your organisation up online, and more people engaging.

 

That will translate into additional donations and new volunteers.

 

Effective marketing gives you the chance to showcase the issues you are confronting, the work you do in the community, and, most importantly, the work you could do with a little more support.

 

That, in turn, boosts funds and volunteers, which allows you to do more, achieve more, and market to more people – your charity could grow, and fast, with a good marketing strategy.

 

 

Reduces costs and promotes sustainability

 

Strategies are long-term plans, allowing your organisation to make informed choices in the future. That’s particularly important when it comes to cost, as marketing can often prove costly, with spending money on elements that have little impact. The marketing strategy allows you to double-down on success and abandon your mistakes.

 

Auditing your marketing, as we’ll explore in detail below, allows you to work out the ROI for different areas of marketing. That audit ensures that you spend more on successful areas. It also ensures that you remain in budget, make realistic choices, and practice financial sustainability.

 

Marketing strategies can define how much you spend in each area. You may want to set a specific budget for AdWords, for example, and a separate budget for social media. The strategy allows you to remain informed with every choice and ensures expenditure is justified.

 

 

Creates ownership and buy-in across the team

 

A marketing strategy should assign roles and responsibilities, giving individuals the chance to complete certain tasks. All employees with any role in marketing should inform the strategy, add detail question relevant elements, and suggest changed when necessary.

 

That means that employees should know what’s expected of them, and by when, which provides a much greater sense of accountability. That in turn improves team buy-in, leading to a improved sense of ownership, better staff retention, and ultimately increased productivity.

 

 

Expands transparency across the organisation

 

Every member of your team should be able to access the marketing strategy. Every member should know what is expected from them, as outlined in the roles and responsibilities. That will increase transparency across your organisation.

 

Organisational transparency is essential for determining workplace happiness. Transparency also increases creativity and productivity, allowing people from across your organisation to get involved and provide their unique knowledge, often in unexpected areas.

 

Transparency also dismantles hierarchies at the workplace – and hierarchies can lead to bottlenecking and inflexibility. Transparency allows people to get on with their work without constantly asking for permission, with a broader knowledge of organisational goals and roles.

 

 

Learn the latest marketing stats, trends, and theories

 

You know the benefits of a marketing strategy. Now you need to do some broad research about marketing trends to help you keep up with the latest developments.

 

Learning about marketing trends helps you stay ahead of the curve. It ensures that you’re not relying on outdated and archaic marketing forms, styles, methods, and tools. To find out about the current market, the quickest and easiest place to start is simply through gathering stats.

 

 

Check out the latest marketing stats

 

You need to regularly check out the latest stats about marketing. These will paint a broad picture of the current market, along with a broad sense of audience desires, both of which should inform your strategy.

 

Consider the following statistics and facts, for example:

• 90% of marketers using short-form video will increase or maintain their investment next year, according to HubSpot, and 21% of marketers plan to leverage short-form video for the first time in 2023
• According to data collected from Statista, Entrepreneur, NealChaffer, Truelist, and Adweek, nearly 94% of businesses use some form of social media. And, the bigger the company, the more likely they are to have a social presence, according to research
• The budget for socials is huge. Statista projects that organisations will spend more than $247bn (approx. £200 billion) on social advertising in 2023
• According to Insider Intelligence, marketers take up a lot of that spend, with a grand total of $65 billion (approx. £52.6 billion) in advertisements
• On average, email marketing has a 4400% ROI, according to OptinMonster
• More than 50% of the organisations that invest in content marketing publish content every day, according to research produced by The Manifest
• Over 65% of online experiences start with a search engine, according to research from Brightedge
• More than 70% of marketers employ keyword research when creating content, according to the CMI

The above gives you an idea of the way marketers are currently working, the emerging elements of marketing, and the most popular forms. But you’ll need to dig a lot deeper.

 

We’ve created some relevant fact sheets that will help you get a broader picture:

• Social media facts for 2023
• Facts about content in 2023
• Facts about marketing in 2023

Look into the above and dive even deeper into any elements you may want to explore. So, for example, if you are considering video marketing, find the relevant stats, look at the best length, the best format, and let the available information define your decisions.

 

 

Read books on marketing strategy

 

The best strategies will depend on a greater knowledge and a deeper understanding. Knowing the stats and trends, along with understanding the latest theories from blogs and websites, will take you only so far. To move ahead of the crowd you should gain a deeper knowledge.

 

The easiest place to start is with that often forgotten about resource: books. Consider a trip to the library, or a local bookshop, and picking up some of the latest (and best) books on marketing strategy and marketing.

 

Here is a short list to get you started:

• This Is Marketing by Seth Godin
• Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger
• Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath
• Marketing Made Simple by Donald Miller
• Becoming A Digital Marketer by Gil and Anya Gildner

The above are just suggestions. There are so many books on the market about marketing, many of which have been published in the past year. Do your research and find the book that best relates to your needs.

 

And remember to ensure the book has been published recently, as marketing trends shift very quickly, so information can fast become outdated.

 

 

Attend marketing events, webinars, and learning opportunities

 

Our final bit of advice is to get involved. Go to conferences that explore the latest trends in marketing strategy and marketing generally, find virtual events that hold sessions on marketing, attend webinars and listen to podcasts, watch videos online, and just get involved. 

 

Keeping up to date and amassing knowledge will improve your marketing strategy. And strategies are always evolving, so you’ll need to regularly update them based on new information. So make engaging with content, listening to podcasts and webinars, and attending events are a regular part of your working life.

 

 

Audit your current marketing outputs

 

An audit allows you to work out current marketing position, that you evaluate successes and failures. It helps you to define current expenditure, your team’s capacity, and other essential pieces of information. Auditing is an essential building block, a pivotal part of the process.

 

Before we begin, remember that you always need to ensure that you have legal consent to use the data and ensure that you are always using the data ethically.

 

Then, you can use each piece of small information to gain a wider picture of your current performance, giving you a greater understanding of audience preference and how your marketing might look in the future.

 

You can perform a marketing audit in various ways. The form of the marketing audit will depend on your organisation and the channels upon which you rely. The key is to establish the success of each channel, finding out specific ROI.

 

 

Find reliable marketing benchmarks

 

Before you start exploring analytics for marketing, you’ll need to find some reliable benchmarks. Benchmarks will prove important in the future. After all, how will you know that you’re doing badly or well if you have nothing to judge your analytics against?

 

So start by establishing measurable benchmarks that elucidate your current success. Some platforms, such as Google Analytics, offer benchmarking tools, which you can use to set benchmarks by industry, location, business size, and so on. That only helps content analytics, though, so you’ll need to find various benchmarks for other areas.

 

One of the best ways to benchmark is simply looking at data from marketing reports, surveys, open-source databases, publications, websites, or even in direct contact with other organisations. In short, you just need to search around, find potential benchmarks, and substantiate them with some other available data from the marketing world and the sector.

 

There are websites that offer a range of marketing benchmarks, based on much of the information mentioned above, that could prove useful to you. And there are websites that collate data from across various sectors, allowing you to quickly determine the benchmarks that you need. Check out the following, for example:

• Gartner
• Indeed
• MailChimp
• Forbes
• Campaign Monitor

It’s worth mentioning that benchmarks change and evolve. You’ll need to intermittently check your benchmarks are still appropriate to the sector as your marketing strategy takes effect. And, as you grow, you may wish to revise your benchmarks in future iterations of the strategy.

 

 

Check out social media analytics

 

There are more than 4.5 billion global monthly users on social media, according to Smart Insights. In addition, more than 57% of the world’s population currently use social media. And the average user spends more than two hours per day scrolling through their socials.

 

Simply put, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn, YouTube, and all the other social media platforms consume so much of our time. And, in 2019, organisations raised more than £1.6 billion fundraising on Facebook alone – social media provide huge opportunities for fundraising, especially when the marketing is done well.

 

But so many organisations use social media ineffectively, aiming to master every platform, looking to reach the wrong demographics, generally spreading time and resources to thin.

 

The key is to look at your social media analytics, find out what’s performing well. Take each platform individually and work from benchmarks you’ve established. Consider how much spend (if any) you dedicate to platforms and the growth and reach of each.

 

Compare and contrast the platforms, noting areas of success and areas where you are struggling. Try to avoid any bias in your data analytics, as people typically show preference to certain socials even if they are not right for the organisation. Just because certain platforms are booming, for example, that does not mean they’re right for you.

 

Do not follow the latest fashion. Follow the analytics.

 

 

Check out Google Ads analytics

 

Marketing teams, to varying degrees, use advertisements for brand awareness, promotion, and so on. Google Ads is the most well-known and most used advertising service.

 

Google Ads provides various analytics and reporting features that can help you track and analyse the performance of ad campaigns. The platform is relatively intuitive, but Google provides a simple guide to help you get to grips with the platform.

 

The key is to establish the best metrics for your organisation. You will likely want to track impressions, click-through rates, average cost-per-click, conversion rate, cost-per-conversion, and potentially some other metrics. All of the above will provide helpful insight into the success of your ads, show clear room for improvement, and give an overall sense of ROI.

 

Many marketing teams also spend money on social media ads. As shown above, you should dive into each platform, judge the success of a particular platform against all other platforms and industry benchmarks, and decide on the overall ROI of such ads.

 

It is particularly important to think about the demographics of each platform, rather than spending money approaching people who are unlikely to engage.

 

 

Check out content marketing analytics

 

Google Analytics (GA) is perhaps the most popular tool for content analytics. GA offers simple functionality at little or no cost and it’s relatively intuitive. There are several other web tools that track analytics, such as Adobe Analytics and Open Web Analytics, which are simple to navigate and free and which will give you a good overview of your website content.

 

On top of these, you’ll need places to track your podcast, webinar, and video analytics, if you depend on those forms of content marketing. That will simply depend on exploring the platforms on which you publish those types of content. If you’re currently using a platform that does not offer analytics, consider switching.

 

Perhaps the data shows that you that longer articles or blogs perform better. Perhaps shorter videos are more successful, or a particular topic of webinar has regularly gained a wider audience. You’ll want to compile the top-level data – page views, bounce rate, and so on – and combine that with precise data that relates specifically to your organisation, or your industry.

 

 

Check out other marketing analytics

 

You may want to consider how your marketing performs in terms of distribution. Email platforms, such as MailChimp, DotDigital, and GetResponse, all have analytics options. Figure out benchmarks and check out open rate, click-through rate, conversation rate, unsubscribes, and so on.

 

Email marketing software can prove useful when it comes to analytics (and in terms marketing itself), so check out our recent article: The ultimate guide to email marketing.

 

You can also check out data from various other areas and forms of marketing, all of which may prove helpful to your audit. That might include, among other things:

• Sales and merchandising data
• Data from event sign-ups
• Data from PR campaigns
• Customer feedback and reviews
• Data from offline marketing
• SMS marketing data

In each case, do your research, find the best way to judge analytics, benchmark against others in the sector and beyond, and draw conclusions about successes and failures.

 

 

Use qualitative research to support quantitative analytics

 

Qualitative data can help you fill gaps in quantitative data. So, for example, you could survey your users – through email, socials, or even face-to-face – and ask them basic questions about your marketing. Where is there room for improvement in your marketing? Do they like the emails they receive? What do they think of your imagery? Is the marketing relevant to them?

 

The key to qualitative research is to think about the information you need. Do not simply ask the expected questions – ask the questions that will best inform your marketing strategy, the questions that will lead to effective improvements, the questions that will ultimately matter.

 

To conduct a survey, you can use any number of digital tools, many of which we explore in our article: The best digital survey tools for charities.

 

For more information on the actual creation of a survey, you can check out our article: How to create the perfect survey.

 

 

Track marketing capacity and resources

 

You need to work out how much time, money, and other resource you will be able to spend on your marketing strategy. That will help you when writing the strategy, allow you to set realistic goals further down the line, and generally ensure you have all the information you may need.

 

You could take a detailed approach: assess your marketing budget, project your expenditure and (if relevant) your income, review human resources and physical assets, account for any external factors, and try to gain a complete financial overview of all transactions.

 

A simpler option is just to note projected expenditure, the people involved, and the hours they’ll be spending on each area of marketing. Or, if you have a pre-existing team dedicated to marketing, you may well be able to simply calculate any additional expenditure required.

 

You’ll also want to track marketing tools. The best way is to list all the platforms you currently use for marketing and judge the efficacy of those platforms. Ensure that you list the price or proposed price spent on each platform, which will later support your decision-making.

 

You might also want to track your skills, too. A digital skills audit pinpoints weaknesses, which you can use to inform your strategy. Remember that training should be a key part of your strategy. You should aim not simply for the right tech, but the right skills to use the right tech.

 

There are a couple of decent options online. One brilliant tool for a digital skills audit is the Digital Check-up, created by the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations. The tool allows charities to map digital capabilities through questions exploring the skills of staff and volunteers. For more information, check out our article: How to conduct a digital skills audit.

 

Ultimately, you’ll want to work out the time, money, tools, resources, and skills you currently have – and that will help you identify the new elements that you might need.

 

 

Define and refine marketing strategy goals

 

You’ve tracked your current position with an audit and learnt the latest marketing stats and trends and knowledge. Now you need to take that information and establish some objectives.

 

 

Define marketing goals in broad terms

 

Your marketing goals should start broad, with the intention of drastically narrowing down. You can use the below goal-setting techniques and the five Ws to fine-tune goals. Before you start, here are some examples of broad goals, followed by narrowed down versions of those goals.

• Improve click-through rate on email marketing
• Increase the reach of one social media platform
• Improve success rate of ads on Google Ads
• Improve search engine optimisation (SEO) for content
• Attract more people to your website

Examples of narrow goals that you should include in your marketing strategy.  

• Aim to reach an average of 11-12% click-through rate for the financial year
• Increase engagement on Twitter by 15% in the financial year
• Achieve a 4.5% conversion rate for Search Ads in the next financial year
• Increase SEO acquisition in 2023 by 42% to 60% as judged by Google Analytics
• Increase site traffic by 10% in the financial year, with year-on-year comparison

The broader marketing goals are not easily measurable. The lack of specifics minimise accountability and allow people to do their own homework and judge their own success. The specifics increase accountability, allowing people to aim at precise numbers.

 

To achieve similar results to the above, transforming your vague broad goals to quantifiable and realistic narrow goals, you can use the two tried-and-tested tactics specified below.

 

 

Use acronym systems for marketing strategy

 

Many people apply the SMART criteria without much thought, as the criteria are relatively natural and logical. The SMART criteria will ensure all your marketing strategy goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timed.

 

That’s a popular and reliable goal-setting technique, but it is just one option among many. You could also consider, for example, FAST goals. FAST goals aim to accelerate your team’s performance by applying the following principles:

• Frequently discussed: Goals should encourage ongoing discussions and goals should be made into an integral part of both team meetings, 1:1 meetings, and OKRs
• Ambitious: Goals should stretch the team – challenging but not impossible
• Specific: As with the S in SMART, goals should be specific, and everyone should be clear about what is required to achieve the goal
• Transparent: Goals should be completely visible and should allow for complete accountability across the organisation

The are other alternatives goal-setting strategies to SMART and FAST – such as CLEAR, HARD, WISE, and many other acronym-based examples.

 

As ever, pick the goal-setting technique that best aligns with your marketing strategy and your organisation. Use the technique to add clarity to your goals. 

 

 

Fine-tune marketing strategy with the five Ws

 

The five Ws are often associated with journalism. The purpose of the five Ws is to further increase specificity, ensuring all goals include all the essential information, which can prove particularly helpful when charities are defining (and refining) their goals.  

 

You can use the five Ws to test out your marketing strategy goals, helping you to notice any blind spots, assign responsibilities, think about timing, and much more. So ask yourself:

• Who will be involved at each stage – designate roles for team members, leaders, etc
• What you need to complete at each stage – examine resources, projected resources, etc
• Where each stage will be complete – on which platforms, channels, socials, etc
• When each stage will be completed by – set timings, flexibility, etc
• Why you’ve set the above – determining factors, economic environment, etc

Use the above to add further clarity to your marketing strategy goals. And remember that it’s better to fine-tune at this stage than push forward despite absence of clarity. The tighter and more comprehensive your strategy goals, the more likely you are to achieve future success.

 

 

Think about marketing strategy actions

 

You know the latest marketing trends. You know your current marketing outputs. You know your current capacity and resources. You’ve set realistic goals, with an awareness of your current output and sector benchmarks. You know what you want to achieve.

 

Now you need to work out how to achieve the things you need to achieve. That is perhaps the most important part of the strategy: what are you actually going to do?

 

The answer depends on your organisation, your size, your skills, your capacity, your industry, your user needs, your current situation, your goals. Start with ideation. Bring ideas to the table, using relevant research, understanding of trends, an awareness of demographics. You will want to use all the information that you’ve amassed and come up with positive and forward-thinking ideas. You can capture the idea on paper or using collaborative tech such as Miro.

 

Miro works as an online whiteboard platform that lets teams of remote and in-office workers collaborate for the delivery of all sorts of products and services. It offers pre-built templates that can be used for brainstorming, research and design, planning, or almost any other type of project, or charity leaders can customise their own templates for specific charity initiatives.

 

After that, you’ll want to whittle down your ideas and make them more precise, more specific, and ensure that they’re directly applicable to the goals that you’ve set.

 

At that point, you’ll want to think about the time it’ll take to perform the tasks, the people responsible for each task, and even establish deadlines that you can add to your strategy when you start writing.

 

 

Actually write your marketing strategy

 

There is no right way to write the strategy. For smaller organisations, the goals might prove minimal and only require one piece of paper, one Word document, perhaps an Excel spreadsheet, or the information captured on a project management system, such as Asana.

 

Producing an epic marketing strategy for a small team is simply unnecessary – and will undermine the benefits of the strategy. For bigger organisations, marketing strategies might spread over several pages.

 

They key is to never spend longer than necessary on your strategy: superfluous information undermines valuable information. There is also the risk of over-strategising, spending all your time on theories and not putting anything into practice.

 

So, in short, start writing and don’t write for too long. Below are some tips to help you start.

 

 

Choose the best format for your marketing strategy

 

The marketing strategy, as suggested above, can take many forms. The choice depends on what works for your organisation. The strategy should be digital – it’ll help with sharing, revising, and distribution – and imagery and other visuals can support the writing where necessary.

 

For the tech-savvy, you might want to consider strategic planning software, as mentioned above. Strategic planning software lets stakeholders decide on strategies and investments, monitor and measure progress, and easily make adjustments, all in one centralised location.

 

 

Write your marketing strategy

 

One person should be responsible for writing your marketing strategy. That will improve consistency and accountability. That does not mean one person decides on every element, but rather one person takes information from teams and ensures consistent look and feel.

 

The writer will employ consistent tone of voice and consistent spacing for each marketing objective. And, of course, the writer should remove all irrelevant information.

 

 

Assign responsibilities in your marketing strategy

 

Ensure the tasks in the marketing strategy are shared. It’s best to define clear roles. Wherever possible, allude to the employees that hold responsibility in various areas of your strategy.

 

Aim to have multiple team members involved with each task, even if their role is simply reviewing, as that will generally improve accountability and ownership.

 

 

Edit your marketing strategy

 

The writer should perform the initial edit of the document. They should look over the initial draft, re-work and ensure it is all consistent, thorough without redundant information, and presented as clearly as possible. Then it should go round to all stakeholders for a further edit.

 

Stakeholders do not need to quibble over grammar, but instead focus on detail, especially relating to areas of expertise. The writer has likely standardised and consolidated lots of disparate information, so team members will need to confirm that it is all accurate and clear.

 

Once the strategy is in its final draft, after the team has checked everything, the writer should put it aside for a week or so and then edit with fresh eyes. That will allow them more clarity and likely lead them to notice mistakes they missed because they were too close.

 

 

Proofread your marketing strategy

 

Enlist someone from outside the team – or outside the organisation, if necessary – to proofread your final strategy. And remember to turn tracked changes on so you can see final amendments.

 

 

Share your marketing strategy

 

You might want to consider enlisting a designer to jazz up your strategy, but that’s only necessary for longer strategies. It’s best to just ensure the strategy is readable, clear and not loaded with any complicating elements, and that all team members understand the contents.

 

Then you can either present the strategy or simply give everyone time to read over. You could post in a shared folder, on the cloud, or on the intranet, whichever works best. Make sure the content strategy is easily accessible and every person can access whenever needed.

 

 

Review, revise, and re-write your marketing strategy

 

You now have an official marketing strategy. It has all necessary information, in a presentable form, and all the relevant stakeholders can gain access.

 

But that’s not the end. An effective marketing strategy is a moving target, constantly evolving, growing and reacting to demands in the sector and the wider economy.

 

You will have to move with trends, noticed patterns in the data, and adjust accordingly.

 

If something is not working, if a marketing campaign is failing, you should change elements based on that new information. The purpose of the strategy is to inform your decision-making, so ensure that you make effective decisions based on information in the strategy.

 

That is not to suggest you should revise everything or start from scratch. But, to achieve goals, deviate from your initial marketing ideas when required.

 

Marketing strategies will grow stale and unusable if they’re not updated, so it’s essential that your regularly review, revise, and re-write. It is essential that you improve.