5 tips to prepare your successful marketing strategy
Building the strategy for your marketing efforts is one of the first big steps and stages of your communication efforts, which might be crucial for the success of your entire business.
Strategic consulting is an important part of the expert services we at dgtl atelier deliver with excellence. We consult business owners and C-level management for their business development, scaling their business through marketing, communications and sales.
Here are 5 important stages of the strategy preparation process that are prove effective in our strategic work with the companies:
Interview your core team
Every strategy preparation starts with getting insights of what really is important. One of the best insights resources for every business are actually the people that build the business on a daily basis. Sometimes managers and business owners underestimate what knowledge do their employees have and most of the time, this knowledge is practically priceless.
Start your team interviews with the employees that are directly working for your brand – marketing, sales, business development, and customer service experts. After that, continue your conversation with all the teams that might have some relevant insights.
Two important things in this stage – it is very important what questions you ask and how you ask them. Some of the employees would prefer teamwork, others would be more relaxed to have a one-on-one meeting, others might prefer to prepare the answers alone and send them by email.
Do your research
After doing your internal research and trying to focus on what your teammates find important for your brand, you must focus on the outside. First, focus on the market – what are the current developments in the market you are operating, what are the tendencies, expectations and forecasts. Next, examine the competition – what are they doing, what is your strategy, what are their current campaigns and where are their efforts focused; what seems to be working well, are there any best practices and takeaways from their work. After that, it is necessary for you to try to be honest and evaluate how is your company positioned in the market and your competition – what is the value your business brings to the market and customers; what are your strong areas and where you could do more, how do you compare to the competition and the market developments.
It is not unusual that some of our clients are not very objective in their internal evaluation, so we always advise that you bring some outside experts and knowledge to your research.
Define the main audiences and examine their behavior
A good target audience and client definition is always crucial for your communications and marketing efforts, especially in digital. We at dgtl atelier have built products and content that drove millions of eyeballs and users, so in the last years, we have built our own methodology for target audiences research and definition.
Nevertheless, always focus on three main areas:
• demographics – age, location, things they love;
• psychographics – what they love, respect and appreciate;
• behavior – what drives their attentions, intentions and decision making; what are their everyday habits.
Always keep in mind that defining and examining the right audience, plus making the right conclusions and takeaways is a highly expert work that requires methodology and experience.
Set the right KPIs
KPI stands for key performance indicator, a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific objective. KPIs provide targets for teams to shoot for, milestones to gauge progress, and insights that help people across the organization make better decisions. KPIs help every area of the business move forward at the strategic level and are crucial for the success of your strategy.
After doing the research, getting insides from your teams and defining your target audiences, you must take a wider look at where you want to go. First, define short-term KPIs – what do you want to achieve with your marketing and communications in the next weeks, months, or a year. You can set different KPIs for different stages of your strategy and business development.
Three things we recommend when defining the short-term KPIs:
1. Keep them short and prioritize the KPIs – setting too many goals and indicators could distract your focus and lead to a risk of wasting resources. Pay attention to the most important milestones and make sure you measure them right;
2. Be realistic – set times and goals that you are actually going to achieve with your teams and resources;
3. Set a dashboard KPIs – a precise place where you keep track of your main goals and follow your progress.
Setting your long-term KPIs right is also a very important part of your strategic work.
Prepare your action plan
It may sound a little bit early for this, but paving your path to success starts from the day you realize you need a good strategy. Set your time frames, actions, milestones and take good time to visualize all the little steps you need to go through to implement your strategy. Preparing a realistic action plan helps you do an assessment of your strategy on a whole new level and it will be crucial to have a clear tasks list your co-workers and teams follow. Before finalizing your strategic action plan, circulate it through everyone that would be involved in the implementation and ask for their feedback and contribution. In this way, you would not only have a more precise plan, but would also be able to engage people in the early phase of the work.
These are some of the most important steps of the strategic consulting expert work we offer, but it is impossible to cover everything in one article. Do not hesitate to contact the dgtl atelier team for further assistance and consulting and keep in mind that some of the strategic services that we are the most recommended for by our clients include:
• Digital Marketing Strategy
• Communications Strategy
• Social Media Strategy
• Content Marketing Strategy
• Go-To-Market Strategy
• Digital Business Development Strategy
