What Is a Marketing Strategy?
A marketing strategy is a company’s long-term plan to promote its products or services and acquire customers. It includes the company’s value proposition, target audience, messaging, positioning, and chosen marketing channels.
It differs from a marketing plan, which is focused more on the actual tactics used to drive new customers and sales.
Why Is an Effective Marketing Strategy Important?
Creating an effective marketing strategy is important as it helps you:
- Increase brand awareness: By getting more people to learn about your brand and improve brand recall
- Improve customer acquisition and retention: By making it easier to attract and keep new customers
- Optimize marketing spend: By letting you allocate your marketing budget more effectively to get a better return on your investment
- Drive revenue and business growth: By generating more revenue for your business and speeding up growth
How to Create a Marketing Strategy
Follow these seven steps to develop a marketing strategy for your business.
1. Set Clear Goals
Decide what you want to achieve through your marketing efforts.
A good way to think about goals is to use the SMART framework:
- Specific: Define your goal clearly
- Measurable: Assign one or more metrics to track progress
- Achievable: Make sure the goal is realistic given current resources and constraints
- Relevant: Align the goal with key business objectives
- Time-bound: Set a deadline for completion
Here’s an example of a SMART goal:
Increase organic traffic by 15% in the next six months by publishing three search engine-optimized pieces of content per week.
2. Research the Market
Market research provides you with insights that allow you to make data-driven decisions when crafting your marketing strategy.
Without proper market research, you’d just be making assumptions. And this might lead to targeting the wrong audience, using ineffective messaging, and misallocating your resources.
Below are a few things you can do to get a better understanding of your target market. So you can fine-tune your marketing approach.
Interview Customers
Interview existing or potential customers to learn more about their needs and pain points.
Find out what they like about your product. And what criteria they use when deciding on products like yours.
If you don’t have customers yet, take an indirect approach to gather these insights by checking out relevant forums.
Whatever you’re selling, there are probably multiple online communities where people who fit your target audience gather. Try to find relevant subreddits and forums where potential customers are having discussions.
Read through the discussions to learn about common pain points and issues.
Join in on the discussions, but refrain from posting promotional content to avoid having your account suspended.
Run a Survey
A survey allows you to gather insights from a large number of people. For example, it can help you get quantitative, statistically relevant data about your target audience’s preferences.
You can create and run a survey yourself using tools like Google Forms or Typeform. Or use platforms like SurveyMonkey or Pollfish, which have built-in audiences.
Analyze Your Competition
Analyzing your competitors can help you uncover market gaps, refine your positioning, and improve your messaging. It also helps you optimize your pricing strategy.
Start by looking at one of your competitors’ websites. Notice how they address their audience and how they talk about their product.
Then, read reviews to understand what customers are saying about your rivals. Pay special attention to what customers don’t like about competing products.
This will help you improve your own product by avoiding making the same mistakes. But it’ll also help you adapt your messaging to cater to these pain points.
For example, if many customers point out an issue with the speed of a product, you can draw attention to how fast your solution is.
Not sure who your main competitors are?
Use Market Explorer to find them.
Select the “Find Competitors” tab. Then, enter your domain and click “Research a market.”
On the “Overview” tab, scroll to the “Domain vs Market Dynamics” table. These are the biggest players in your market.
The “Benchmarking” tab shows how your site compares against competitors. It compares traffic, search volume, acquisition channels, social media platforms, and more.
Use these insights to understand who your top competitors are on each marketing channel.
Use Social Listening
Social listening involves tracking specific keywords across social media platforms to learn what users are saying about a topic.
This can help you get a better understanding of your target market and the overall sentiment toward existing solutions in the market.
Brand Monitoring tracks keywords related to your industry or even competitor brand names.
You can even set it up to get email alerts whenever a specific keyword is mentioned online. Or when there’s a sudden spike in mentions.
Identify Search Trends
Understanding how your target customers use search engines can help you understand current industry trends. And it helps you identify the most pressing pain points your audience faces.
Semrush’s Keyword Overview tool simplifies this process. Simply type in a target keyword and it will show a number of useful metrics, including:
- Global search volume: How many people across the world search a particular keyword each month
- Country-specific search volume: The number of searches for the keyword performed across specific countries
- Search trend: The popularity of the search term over the past 12 months
3. Define Your Positioning
Clarify why customers should choose your product or service over competing options.
Answer these questions to define your brand’s positioning:
- Who is your target audience?
- What problem does your product solve?
- How does your product solve the problem better or differently than competing products?
- What category are you competing in?
Then, write a positioning statement—a concise description of your offering and how it serves your target market.
Here’s a formula:
[Product name] helps [target audience] [the problem your product solves], so they can [key benefit].
For example:
Semrush helps marketers and businesses improve their online visibility, so that they can drive more traffic, generate leads, and outperform their competition.
4. Craft Your Messaging
Your messaging communicates your positions and value across all channels (website, ads, and email). Keep it consistent.
Here’s how to boost the effectiveness of your messaging:
Highlight the Primary Value
Explain why your product matters, not just what it does.
- What: "Our project management software has drag-and-drop functionality."
- Why: "Finish projects 30% faster with intuitive workflows that adapt to how your team actually works."
Showcase the Benefits
Turn each feature into a clear benefit for your customer.
- Feature: "Our app includes calendar integration."
- Benefit: "Never miss another deadline or important meeting. Your schedule stays synchronized across all devices, giving you back control of your day."
Emphasize Differentiation
Explain exactly how your solution is unique. Avoid vague statements like “competitive pricing.”
- Vague: "We offer competitive pricing."
- Clear: "Instead of charging per user, our community plan allows unlimited team members. This means your collaboration tools can grow with your business.”
5. Choose Your Marketing Channels
Select the marketing channels that best reach your target audience and fit your budget.
Here’s what to consider when deciding on which channels to use:
Target Audience
Identify where your audience spends time online (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, TikTok) and how they prefer to consume content (e.g., text or video).
To find these platforms, open Market Explorer and go to the “Audience” tab. Scroll down to the “Social Media” widget to see the platforms your target audience uses most.
Sales Cycle Length
Paid advertising and direct response channels tend to work well for businesses with a shorter sales cycle (e.g., B2C ecommerce).
For longer sales cycles (e.g., B2B SaaS), invest in content marketing and SEO.
Time Frame and Budget
Paid search ads often show faster results but can be expensive. SEO may deliver better returns over time but takes longer to see results.
Which channels you choose will therefore affect how you distribute your budget across your marketing efforts.
6. Set Your Budget
A common guideline is to allocate 5-20% of your business’s revenue to marketing. The actual amount depends on your industry, growth goals, and business stage.
An early stage startup will likely need to invest a higher percentage of revenue into marketing to see results.
A well-established business with steady organic growth might only need to invest a small fraction of its revenue into marketing.
After determining your marketing budget, divide it across your proven marketing channels.
A small portion should go to newer but proven strategies. While an even smaller (but still significant) portion goes toward experimental marketing channels, as these have the potential to drive high growth.
7. Launch Your Strategy and Monitor Progress
When you’re ready to launch your marketing strategy, measure your progress by tracking the metrics you outlined in the goal-setting stage.
If your goal is to drive more traffic, monitor visitor metrics using Google Analytics. And track your keyword rankings with Position Tracking.
To monitor progress toward revenue goals, track important metrics like:
- Total conversions
- Conversion rate
- Bounce rate
- Abandoned cart rate (for ecommerce stores)
Remember: Your marketing strategy isn’t set in stone. Revise it every quarter based on the insights you gain.
Make data-driven decisions at every stage to ensure you maximize your budget. Use tools like Semrush’s Market Explorer to streamline your efforts.