Marketing strategy – what is it and how does it affect the company? How do you create it?

The marketing strategy binds together the activities of the entire company and indicates the direction of its development. Its creation and successful implementation is one of the determinants of success for any new brand. How to define its objectives? What should be kept in mind while developing it?

What is a marketing strategy?

Amarketing strategy is one of the most important documents in any company, and certainly the most important in the area of marketing. It contains all the information about objectives, mission, brand activities, business environment and customers – model and actual. It should be created prior to the start of all activities by the marketing department and/or the marketing director, and then consistently implemented, improved and developed.

Strategies can be graded: from the most general to the more specific. In the broadest sense, a strategy will specify the entirety of a brand’s marketing activities. In the case of narrower strategies, they are most often divided into communication, product and company strategies.

Thecommunication strategy specifies the ways in which the brand will use to communicate with customers and distribute content. It will include information on the types of content tailored to the specifics of the product or brand and guidance on target channels, e.g. online / offline.

For the product strategy, the product ‘s differentiating features, target customers and the best channels for promotion will be important. Assumptions will place the product in a broader context and indicate how, where and when to show it to the audience.

Thecompany strategy describes the activities focused on promoting the brand. It includes data on the company’s differentiators or sales personas. The document must take into account issues such as the specific industry in which your company operates or methods of responding to possible problems.

Marketing strategies often combine detailed communication, company and product marketing plans. Although they can be treated separately, it is definitely more effective if all elements work together. It will be better to design a single marketing strategy that integrates the individual product strategies, for example, rather than treating them in isolation. This also allows you to better design a coherent communication of your brand.

Why develop a marketing strategy?

To be successful in the market, you cannot operate in the dark. A marketing strategy can be understood as a kind of map. It allows a company to better understand its market position and helps managers to make sound business decisions.

Brand strengths, weaknesses, USPs and UVPs

Developing a strategy allows you to clearly identify the strengths and weaknesses of your brand. This is the starting point for subsequent, more detailed activities. Marketing specialists analyse your business to date and identify what has underpinned your success and what has hindered it.

Together with strengths and weaknesses, a brand’s USP (Unique Sales Proposition) and UVP (Unique Values Proposition) can be distinguished. UVPs directly derive from the brand’s advantages and disadvantages and indicate the elements that differentiate your company from others. USPs, on the other hand, indicate the specific features of your product that make it different from all similar ones.

For example, if your company’s strength is the quality of your production, you can highlight reliability as a UVP and production in accordance with the latest standards as a USP. All this information helps you in the later stages of your marketing strategy.

Mission and vision

Once the strengths and weaknesses of the brand are known, you can move on to defining its mission and vision. These should be directly derived from the company’s specifics, the team’s values and previous market activities.

They are also important in the context of marketing activities. They allow for the selection of appropriate communication methods or language tailored to the target audience.

Goals

Strategy is used to define marketing and business objectives. They are interrelated. Business objectives (e.g. selling a certain number of products) determine image objectives (e.g. building the image of an expert in the industry – since your company has such a position, it is able to achieve a lot) and vice versa. Efficient marketing can lead to the success of a product and vice versa. If a product sells well, promotional campaigns can be built around it.

Identifying difficulties

One of the tasks of the strategy is to identify potential problems that your brand may encounter. It is impossible to single out all of them, but knowing your brand’s strengths and weaknesses sets out areas where difficulties may arise. This enables solutions to be developed so that the company does not waste time looking for them when problems arise.

Controlling budgets

One of the most important reasons for creating marketing strategies is to estimate budgets. Once your company knows what it wants to promote, how and where, it can move on to determining the necessary expenditure. This, in turn, will allow you to include them in the overall budget.

Once implemented, assumptions can be compared with actual expenditure and income.

Linking to other company activities

The strategy integrates marketing with other areas of the company. The document should clearly indicate the points of contact and define the requirements and tasks for each department.

For example, engineers know how a product is built and how it works. Marketing can use their knowledge to build a story about the product and link it to the company’s mission and vision.

This, in turn, can influence engineers to think not only about the principle of the product when designing it, but also about the values it brings to customers’ lives.

This kind of synergy can translate into better performance for the company as a whole.

Easier decision-making

Because strategies diagnose goals, methods and problems, they can be used in decision-making – both marketing and business.

What should be included in a marketing strategy?

Any marketing strategy, regardless of its scope, should contain several important elements. One of the most important, which should be defined at the outset of the work, is the timeframe and indicators. The strategy should clearly specify what the company has achieved in the past, how it is performing at the moment and what it should do in the future.

It is worth remembering that to be most effective, a strategy should cover many areas. Therefore, it is good to include not only all the information about your company, but also to place it in a specific context. To make it as broad as possible, you should look at the activities of your customers and competitors.

Marketingstrategies should include clearly defined and achievable objectives. In addition to these, the document should include KPIs by which performance will be measured. Every strategy must include an action plan and a budget.

How to create a marketing strategy?

Creating a good and effective marketing strategy can be a lengthy process. An effective way to work on a marketing strategy is to brainstorm. It should start by working with data and drawing conclusions from it – these will serve as a framework for the future document and set out areas for action. Brainstorming will also work well in defining objectives and initially gathering ideas for the strategy. Ranking them according to a single criterion (e.g. importance or feasibility) will facilitate later work.

It is important to bear in mind that the document often covers the whole company, and not only the marketing department is involved in its development. The length of time it takes to create a strategy depends on the size and specifics of the company, but whether your brand is just starting out or is already well established, the process can be broken down into a number of fixed stages.

Data analysis

The first step should be data analysis. Not only does this give you a solid ‘baseline’, but more importantly, it clearly identifies areas that are working well and those that need improvement. In addition, the use of hard data makes subsequent work easier .

Competitor analysis is also necessary. It indicates the fields in which other brands are doing well and those in which they are struggling. This can serve as inspiration for further marketing plans, but above all it identifies possible threats from other brands.

Also, analysing customer behaviour helps you to develop your marketing strategies. It shows the consumers most interested in your brand and will allow you to create or modify sales personas.

Estimating budgets

Before the team goes to work on the details of the strategy, it is a good idea to determine the budget for its implementation. This is a way of speeding up the work – because staff need to fit within the budget, they won’t waste time coming up with actions outside of it.

Developing specific objectives

The objectives created during the initial brainstorming will certainly change as the strategy is developed. Defining a budget enables a clear indication of achievable objectives in the short and long term.

The objectives may vary and should cover different scopes. It is therefore useful to set several specific goals (e.g. increase product sales by x% or reach x-y age group customers) and one overall goal that the company will aim for in the long term (e.g. become the biggest brand in a given sector).

Planning

Once the objectives have been identified, you can move on to work on the specific parts of the marketing strategy. Whether general or product-specific, they should include information on factors such as:

Communication channels

For a strategy to be successful, it should clearly specify the channels used to reach customers. These should be tailored to their preferences (e.g. if your brand is targeting a younger audience, you may want to consider TikTok) and the budgets provided.

Brand identity

The strategy must make it clear whether the activities undertaken will use your brand’s existing branding and colour scheme, or whether they will be modified or created from scratch.

Time frame

The strategy should specify exactly when it will be implemented.

Tools to be used

This part should be treated as broadly as possible to increase the number of channels of outreach. Tools will include paid advertising on social media, ebooks that place your product in some context or activities that influence the positioning of the website in search results. It is important to remember that the tools should be tailored to the budget set. The type of marketing activities should also be adapted to the audience and the objectives set.

What does the implementation of a marketing strategy look like?

The plans developed need to be implemented. For this purpose, it is necessary to appoint a team responsible for such activities and to control the effects of its implementation. For this purpose, it is necessary to use, among other things, previously developed KPIs. It is also good to collect data on the effectiveness of the strategy on an ongoing basis. This will allow you to react quickly to difficulties and may be useful in the future for developing further actions.

How much does a marketing strategy cost?

The price of a marketing strategy depends on the type, the activities, the specifics of the brand and the budget. Its development is a labour-intensive and lengthy process, but in return your company receives a detailed action plan that can help it improve its market position. With a strategy, you can avoid additional costs. Consistent implementation of the developed plan can bring greater financial, business and image benefits than operating blindly.

Although you may entrust the creation of a strategy to your company’s marketing department, you may get better results by outsourcing this task to an external agency. Enlisting the help of an agency, such as a marketing agency or interactive agency, also allows you to look at your brand’s operations from the outside and point out things that you and your employees may not be seeing.

Marketing strategy – how does it affect the business?

The primary purpose of a strategy is to plan the feasible marketing activities, which will bring the best possible effect to your brand. However, this is only the most general level of impact of the strategy. First and foremost, it shows the company’s level of development and its strengths and weaknesses. This in turn can be translated into its business objectives.

In addition to this, an effectively implemented strategy can increase awareness of your brand and improve sales performance. It also helps to maintain a consistent brand image, which increases business confidence. Without it, the actions taken can be chaotic and generate far more costs than they should.

Although developing and implementing a strategy can sometimes be very costly, the returns – financial and image – can be much greater.