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Every business sets out with several marketing objectives. To ensure that you achieve these goals, it’s wise to have a plan.
This plan is known as your marketing strategy.
Understanding what is a good marketing strategy versus a bad one is has to do with several factors that we’ll discuss on this page.
Before you can begin assembling effective marketing strategies, you need to gain an intimate knowledge of your customers, competitors, the market as a whole and more.
This discussion will give you a step-by-step guide on how to create a good marketing strategy to start achieving your business goals today.
Let’s begin.
A good marketing strategy is like a good plan. It needs to be well thought out, detailed and have a clear purpose or objective. Then, it should include several steps or milestones that aim to achieve that objective.
In a marketing plan, these steps or milestones often include the various channels and tactics you’ll use. For example, a digital marketing strategy might consist of your social media marketing plans and content marketing schedule.
Establishing a marketing strategy is a critical first step because it lays the groundwork for all of your efforts to follow. It’s like a roadmap for how you’ll approach your marketing and achieve your goals.
Without this essential plan, you may have disjointed strategies that seem good on paper but don’t actually support your primary goals and objectives.
Arguably, the main benefit of effective marketing strategies is organization. Having this overarching plan or roadmap helps keep you on-task and aligns all of your smaller strategies to pursue the right goals.
That said, there are many other more tangible rewards to creating a good marketing strategy.
A typical digital marketing strategy objective is to increase traffic, whether to your website, physical storefront or both. People coming to your website or store are there for a specific purpose that often connects to your primary goals.
For example, an ecommerce business’ main objective is to increase sales. Before they can complete customer purchases, they need the traffic to their online store.
You can’t hope to complete your marketing goals without customer traffic. Thus, any good marketing strategy should include several tactics for encouraging more visitors to your store or website.
More traffic means more potential leads, conversions, sales, etc. In other words, increasing your traffic increases the number of opportunities you have for visitors to act in ways that are valuable to your business.
Many of the tactics you’ll include in your digital marketing strategy put your content, messages and other details in front of target audiences. Social media, SEO, email marketing and many different methods focus on visibility and getting in front of audiences.
This increased visibility improves your brand awareness and allows you to reach new people. Audiences will get familiar with your branding, products, offers and more.
It’s these interactions that help you carve your own position in the market. With more brand awareness, it’ll be easier for audiences to recall your business and choose it over potential competitors.
Sales and revenue are some of the most common and essential objectives for marketers. Ultimately, many of your marketing tactics focus on driving sales. For instance, when you increase your store or site traffic, the hope is that sales and revenue also spike.
What is a good marketing strategy if not a plan that outlines how you’ll increase your sales and revenue?
You should include several sales-focused strategies in your plan. These activities may be connected to increasing traffic or brand awareness, but you should have a clear idea of the sales/revenue impact of each.
While sales and revenue are the typical “end” objective for marketers, you shouldn’t stop here. Customer loyalty and retention is a crucial step that marketers often forget.
These are the marketing messages that occur after a customer has already completed a conversion or purchase. The objective of these marketing strategies is to encourage future activities from past users.
Remember, it costs more to acquire new customers than to encourage repeat business from past ones. So, as you try to build new leads and clientele, don’t forget the customers you’ve already established!
The specific, detailed nature of a effective marketing strategy means there are many factors to consider and things you need to remember to include.
To help you decide what is a good marketing strategy is, here are 8 steps you should follow.
What is a good marketing strategy? It’s a plan to achieve your business goals. So, the first thing you need to do in developing this plan is to revisit your goals and acknowledge what they are.
These goals should follow the “SMART” criteria.
The more direct and specific your goals are, the easier they are to measure and put to a realistic timeframe.
In this step, you’ll define your brand. This is something you’ve likely done before, but it’s a good idea to revisit it as you develop your effective marketing strategy. This will give you a nice refresher of your brand guidelines.
In particular, you want to think about your unique selling points and the value proposition of your brand. You’ll want to highlight these repeatedly in your marketing tactics.
Since marketing is so dependent on messaging, you should also consider your brand voice. This defines how you present your business in your content and messages. Do you use a professional tone? Or, is it more light and friendly?
You want your voice to be consistent across your marketing efforts.
Similar to your brand identity, you’ve probably already built some buyer personas and you have a good grasp of who your audience is. It’s not a bad idea to revisit these customer profiles and make any adjustments.
In developing these personas, there are a few lessons to keep in mind:
Many channels, tactics and other components will make up your marketing strategy. You have to strategically choose the ones with the most value to offer your business and its goals.
This is why it’s smart to first consider your goals, branding and audiences.
You want to choose marketing strategies for business that align with these elements, especially your audience.
For instance, it wouldn’t make much sense to spend time marketing on channels where your target audience isn’t active. You also want to ignore strategies that don’t directly impact your goals.
Alongside choosing your digital marketing tactics, you also have to consider your budget. Each new strategy you add to your plan will carry some costs. You need to understand your total budget to know how large you can make your overall strategy.
Determining the costs of each strategy isn’t always easy. Many digital marketing tactics do not have a direct cost. So, you may have to assess the value of the time you spend on these strategies.
For example, you can write blogs for your content marketing yourself. This doesn’t cost any money, but it will require substantial time.
You don’t want to stretch yourself too thin or time or money when planning your strategies.
In step 6, you combine the work from steps 4 and 5 and begin creating the framework of your plan. You have chosen which strategies to utilize at this page and decided how much time and money to spend on each.
Now, you have to schedule all these efforts and fit them into your plan.
Since effective marketing strategies utilize many different tactics and channels, you’ll likely have more than one schedule. For example, you’ll develop a content calendar for your blog and social media platforms and an ad schedule or budgeting plan for your Google Ads account.
Your master schedule will plan these activities across all your channels and act as the roadmap of your marketing execution.
With your plan complete, it’s time to begin launching your strategies across the various channels and platforms you’ve selected.
This may seem like a straightforward step, but this is where you can run into unexpected problems that slow down the start of your marketing strategy.
For new channels, you may run into problems setting up your account. You may also hit roadblocks learning how each platform operates.
It’s a good idea to give yourself a week to roll out your marketing strategy. This will give you time to overcome any of these obstacles, without completely altering your timeline.
The final step in creating an effective marketing strategy is to begin tracking your results. Remember, having measurable goals and strategies is key to your success. Otherwise, you won’t know when your efforts are working or not.
Once your marketing strategy officially begins, you want to monitor the performance of each tactic and channel. Pay particularly close attention to the costs of these strategies and the results you’re receiving in return.
You don’t want negative marketing ROI to get in the way of your growth!
There are many channel-specific tools to help you track your results. For instance, Google Analytics will monitor your website activity. The Google Ads dashboard is another example that helps you monitor your ad performance.
There are plenty of marketing strategies out there, meaning you have lots of choices when constructing your own marketing strategy.
Some of these strategies you simply cannot ignore. Content marketing, for instance, is something that every business benefits from because content assets are so versatile.
PPC advertising is another can’t-ignore strategy. Yet, it is one that many marketers shy away from.
PPC stands for “pay-per-click.” It is a model of Internet advertising where your business pays a small fee each time someone clicks your ad content.
PPC is one of the most effective marketing strategies because it is the fastest way to increase your website traffic.
Since website traffic leads to sales, brand awareness and everything else, PPC is extremely valuable. It’s also the quickest way to gain visibility on search engine results pages.
SEO, content marketing, social media marketing and many other strategies take lots of time to develop and grow to the point that they create lots of value for your business. PPC marketing starts producing returns right away.
As soon as you publish your first ad campaign, you can start seeing increased traffic to your landing pages.
While PPC advertising has many benefits that marketers love, it does come with its challenges.
The most obvious disadvantage is the costs. PPC advertising has a direct paid element. It’s even in the name! Other strategies are inherently free. It costs nothing to post on social media or start a blog. You invest what you want to increase your results.
Thus, you need to plan your advertising activities strategically. You don’t want to waste money on lousy ad campaigns that produce no results.
How do you know a good ad campaign from a bad one? That leads to the most significant challenge of PPC campaign management: data.
PPC campaigns produce tons of data. You have to monitor and track this data to determine which ads and keywords are producing good results or not.
Even when you get your campaigns working well, your performance is subject to change. Several factors can influence your results, such as competing ads, changes to Google Ads policies, shifts in user search behaviors and more.
If you find yourself struggling to get good results from your PPC strategies, we recommend taking a look at PPC Signal.
PPC Signal is a Google Ads account optimization tool that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to automatically monitor your campaigns. It is one of the best PPC optimization tools for new and veteran users alike.
The system compares current metric performance to past periods and looks for patterns, deviations or anomalies. When it detects one of these events, it analyzes the data, packages it and presents it on your PPC Signal dashboard.
Here’s a sample of this dashboard:
This example shows 21 active changes in the account. Each of these changes is a complete insight that is ready for the user to open and explore. No additional analysis or data gathering is required because PPC Signal has done the work for you!
The sample screenshot includes 21 active signals. However, depending on the size of your Google Ads account, you could have hundreds of new changes appear each day.
That’s a lot of data to navigate, especially to find the most relevant and crucial changes.
PPC Signal is in the business of making your life as a PPC manager easier, not harder. So, the system includes several filtering options that allow you to search for the exact types of insights you want to explore.
For example, if clicks are your most critical performance indicator, you can filter your active signals to only include changes to this metric.
This turns those 21 insights into just 5, a much more manageable number. You can filter by any of your PPC performance metrics. Alternatively, you can filter by any of the other options, including:
The purpose of these filters is to remove any noise so you can focus on the changes that matter most.
PPC Signal is not the only Google Ads optimization tool to automatically update you to changes in your account. However, it does provide the most complete insights possible.
PPC Signal includes every detail relevant to the change, which means you don’t have to search for added information to complete the insight.
You can see:
You can elect to explore any change further. This opens an expanded view of the data, including an interactive visualization.
Using this chart, you can display multiple metrics side-by-side to see how one change impacts other parts of your account.
With PPC Signal’s complete insights, you can swiftly act on the latest data changes. Faster reactions lead to greater value. If you can mitigate risks sooner and capitalize on opportunities faster than the competitors, you can maximize the impact of every improvement you make.
That’s the advantage of PPC Signal’s complete insight detection.
Think of a digital marketing strategy as your top-level plan that dictates how to carry out your online marketing efforts. So, your digital marketing plan includes many smaller strategies and tactics.
For example, this plan will cover your social media marketing strategy, along with its goals, tactics, timelines, etc. Your digital marketing strategy will also include your content marketing plans, PPC marketing campaigns and more.
You want to include anything that falls under the wide umbrella of digital marketing in your strategy.
A digital marketing strategist works with businesses (or internally with other marketers) to make an effective plan that achieves the client’s primary goals and objectives.
The role of a strategist may end once this plan is complete. However, there are times when a strategist is also in charge of the execution and management of this plan.
The most effective marketing strategies consider the target audience, market, competitors and many other critical details. The more intel you can gather on these factors, the easier it is to make a winning strategy.
What is a good marketing strategy to drive online business? While there is no perfect recipe for your marketing strategy, you can take steps to develop more effective marketing strategies.
Planning is vital. Each part of your marketing strategy needs to serve a direct purpose and help you achieve your business goals.
If you don’t put in the proper time to plan your strategies, your overall marketing experiences will suffer.
If you incorporate PPC advertising in your marketing strategy (and you should because it’s one of the most effective strategies out there), we recommend checking out PPC Signal.
Not only will it make your life easier, but it will also allow you to respond to changes to your ad campaigns faster, limiting risks and maximizing performance.
If you find yourself struggling to keep up with your ad accounts, PPC Signal is the best solution.
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