5 Steps to Level Up Your Marketing Strategy

Jul 13

A marketing strategy is like a living, breathing entity. It’s continually changing and adjusting to the environment. It needs room to grow and evolve, and it can’t do that if you just set it and forget it.

When you ignore your marketing strategy, it can quickly grow stale.

Changes in customers, demand, markets, competitors, and culture happen. If your marketing stays the same during these external changes, it can become outdated, out-of-touch, and ineffective.

So, how can you create a marketing strategy that is alive and constantly evolving and improving?

You can use these five steps to consistently level up your marketing -- whether you are just starting out, going through a major marketing pivot, or simply keeping up with the times.

1. Conduct Research

Looking at factors outside of your marketing is the first step to leveling up your marketing. To keep your marketing strategy relevant, you must conduct research to know what is happening in your industry and with your customers and competitors.

Conduct research into the following categories, and use these questions to begin to draw out information and insights.

Industry Trends

What are top trends?
Is public perception changing about any topics, industry, or markets?
Where are growth opportunities that are being tapped into?

Competitive Research

Who are your competitors?
How are they reaching customers successfully?
What platforms do they use?
How large and successful is their online footprint?
What are their unique value propositions?
How are you different from them?

Audience Research

What problems does your audience have? What pains them?
What do they value? What motivates them?
Where do they look for answers and solutions?
What platforms and media outlets do they like and trust?

Keyword Research

What keywords are related to your industry?
What terms are most commonly searched for?
What terms can you compete for in organic search rankings?
What terms can you budget for in pay-per-click advertising?

Recommended Reading: Know These 3 Things Before You Begin Marketing

2. Audit Your Existing Brand Presence

Once you have a good view of what is happening outside of your business, take a closer look at what your brand is doing.

Review platforms where your brand has a brand presence and has conducted marketing efforts in the past. Look for strengths that you can capitalize on, weaknesses that you need to address, opportunities for growth, and threats to your brand.

To audit your marketing:

Review your website, social media profiles and mentions, emails, ads, and sales materials.
Review and analyze analytics and data on each platform.
Conduct an SEO and content audit of your website.
Perform a search for your brand name to see where your brand might be mentioned on other websites.
Review brand mentions on social media sites.

3. Revisit (or Create) Your Marketing Strategy

Once you have a good overview of your industry, competitive landscape, and current marketing positioning, you will be equipped to update your marketing strategy.

A marketing strategy directs the tactics you use to promote your brand.

If you are just starting out, you might not have a marketing strategy yet. If you are an existing brand, you probably have a marketing strategy, but you will need to regularly revisit it to make sure it’s still accurate and relevant.

A marketing strategy should answer questions such as:

What is your brand story?
What are your mission, vision, and values?
What are you solving for your customers?
What’s your unique selling proposition (USP)?
Who is your ideal customer and where can you reach them?
How do you communicate your USP to your ideal customers?

4. Test New Marketing Tactics

Now, you can begin to make informed changes to your marketing tactics. It’s worth noting that you don’t want to make changes to your marketing tactics just to make changes to your marketing tactics. You want to use information to drive changes.

If something is working, keep at it to garner incremental growth to reach your sweet spot of conversion. If something is broken, stop it. And in the meantime, try new things to see what will produce the best results.

Great marketing is all about trying new tactics and testing to see what works.

To level up your marketing strategy, consider what you learned in steps one through three and decide if you need to try new tactics to breathe new life into your marketing.

What changes can you make to existing campaigns to boost performance?
Can you change the messaging, audience, or product positioning to be more effective?
What marketing channels aren’t you using that you should try?
What marketing channels are you using that are working and you should invest more in?
Is the data collected segmented enough to make decisions for improvement?

Recommended Reading: What Is Marketing Anyway?

5. Set Goals, Review Data, and Iterate

Testing new marketing tactics only works if you also take this final step. You must also set goals and review the results of your work so you can iterate and improve.

When you launch new marketing tactics, set key performance indicators that enable you to review the results of the campaign. Ensure that you have the right tools to help you collect and analyze the data and you’re analyzing the right set of data to make improvements. Use reporting tools for:

Google Data (Google Data Studio consolidates data from Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Google Search Console)
Customer Relationship Management Tools - or whatever your sales team uses for deal flow
Sales and Point-of-Sale Systems
Email Marketing
Social Media Marketing

Less quantifiable, but don’t forget, good ‘ole conversations with the sales team can garner a ton of insight, too. When you set goals, gather data, and measure results, you can get a clear picture on what is working and what is not working. You will gain the insight to decide which marketing tactics to invest in and which to pull back from.

Continuously Level Up Your Marketing Strategy

Creating a marketing strategy once is not enough. It’s a task that will need ongoing attention. While this is a five-step process, it’s really a cycle that you must go through repeatedly.

For marketing to be truly effective, it needs to be a constant project that evolves and changes over time.

If you haven’t revisited your marketing in a while or are worried that your existing strategies are growing stale, let’s talk. SpotOn can help you conduct research, audit your existing strategies, launch new strategies, and use data to create a constant loop of improvement. Contact us today.

strategy

Amanda Sanz