Planning plays a crucial role in every aspect of life. Half of your task is successful if you plan it well. Developing a marketing strategy for a business is a part of its planning process. It is a roadmap to be followed to get the best results from the marketing efforts. Therefore, every business should have a go-to-market strategy to achieve its goals.
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What is a marketing strategy?
A marketing strategy refers to a guide or a blueprint to execute your marketing activities and achieve set goals for your business. A robust marketing strategy will help your products or services reach the right audience. Without it, you would just be throwing things to the wall to see what sticks.
Businesses need to document a marketing strategy to align their efforts to specific goals and overall business objectives. It allows the brands to identify what resonates with the target audience and keep on the right track.
Having marketing strategy templates helps a brand define its goals, identify the target audience, and understand its competitors. It captures and communicates your long-term approach and your understanding of the market. There are plenty of free templates for marketing strategy built using Excel and PowerPoint. These templates can be downloaded quickly and later customized according to your business’ requirements. Each template addresses some unique aspect of marketing strategy, and when used in combination, these templates can showcase your strategy holistically.
How do you develop a marketing strategy template?
Your marketing strategy is vital for different campaigns and projects. Therefore, you should devote complete attention and care while drafting it.
So, how do you write a marketing strategy? Any effective marketing strategy can be drafted by following the steps given below.
- Prepare an executive summary
An executive summary includes information such as the company’s mission statement, company history, marketing team members, marketing plan description, and other useful business information. It is prepared to ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding business goals, from the marketing team to other departments in the company.
- Set marketing goals
You should have a clear idea of what you want to achieve from your marketing efforts. Set SMART goals specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-framed. Common marketing goals include increasing sales, boosting brand awareness, driving more web traffic, generating more leads, etc. Setting goals makes it easier for you to stay on track.
- Know your target audience
Your marketing activities need to be relevant to your target customers. For that, you should know who your target audience is and what motivates their buying behavior. Gathering demographic information like age, income, preferences, etc., conducting interviews, and customer feedback are ways to understand them. Based on your market research and data analysis, create buyer personas and determine the marketing activities best to reach out to them.
- Perform competitor’s analysis
While drafting your marketing strategy, you should consider what your competitors are up to since you all are eyeing the same audience. Get clear answers to these questions:
- How is their product different from yours?
- Who is their target audience?
- What are their brand’s positioning and values?
- What differentiates you from them?
A competitor analysis will provide insights into the marketing efforts you need to make, and you can even learn a lot from the successful strategies of your competitors.
- SWOT Analysis
To stand out among your competitors and showcase your unique strengths to potential customers, you need to perform a SWOT analysis. It helps you understand your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You can then develop a unique selling proposition (USP) for your business, clearly communicating to the customers why they should buy from you.
- Fix a marketing budget
The primary purpose of drafting a marketing strategy is to get a fair idea of how much time and money you will invest in marketing activities. Some marketing efforts like content writing, social media posts, etc., are almost free but do take up a great deal of your time. Therefore, decide beforehand how many hours per week you will spend on social media marketing or writing blogs.
Schedule each of your marketing activities over a set period. Be very specific about how much resources you will spend on different marketing aspects like digital advertising, freelancers, different marketing channels, and other online tools.
- Branding voice, tone, and identity
Marketing campaigns do not have the sole objective of promoting your products, as they also offer a way for the target audience to know what your brand stands for, and what message it conveys. It is why brands adopt a consistent look and tone.
A unique brand voice and design aesthetic help customers identify your brand and even engage with it if they are impressed by your brand’s values.
- Understand the marketing funnel
To market your products to the right people at the right time, you need to understand the buyer’s journey. The marketing funnel begins when a customer identifies his needs and ends when he buys a product to address that need.
There are three stages in a marketing funnel:
- Top of the Funnel (TOFU) is when the buyer becomes aware of different products in the market.
- Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) is when the buyer begins his research about the products.
- Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) is when the buyer decides to buy the product from you or your competitor.
Understanding at which stage of the funnel the buyer is will help send targeted and personalized messaging to address the buyer’s concerns and convince him to make a transaction.
- Select the best marketing channel
Multiple marketing channels are available today, but not all these channels are equally relevant for you, depending on your target audience. Choose the right marketing channels for you to get the most out of your marketing efforts. Allocate time and resources according to the relevance of each channel. For some brands, email marketing would work best, while for others it could be social media marketing.
Marketing strategy templates
Here are some examples of digital marketing strategy templates that can help you come up with a marketing strategy of your own.
- Marketing goals
This template can be used to keep track of your marketing goals’ progress and align the marketing team around these goals. It helps you set success metrics for each goal and provide a strategic overview of your strategy.
Source: Aha
- Target market
This segment profile template can help you to know your target audience. It captures the demographic and behavioral information of each customer segment. It also provides valuable information such as market size, risk factors, and growth potential, which help you assess business opportunities for you.
Source: Aha
- SWOT analysis
SWOT analysis templates are available for brands to help them identify their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Using this, you can identify what you are doing right and where are the loopholes in your strategy. It helps you improve your overall marketing approach and keeps you in the right direction.
Source: Aha
- Marketing mix
There are 10 Ps of marketing that make your overall marketing mix, such as price, product, physical environment, etc. This template captures these attributes in one place and allows you to assess how each attribute contributes towards the fulfillment of your marketing objectives. It, thus, makes it easier for you to see the whole picture and pay equal attention to all the crucial attributes.
Source: Aha
- Buyer personas
It is of primary importance to know who your ideal customer is. The buyer persona template helps you to accomplish that. It captures essential insights about each persona’s goals, challenges, wants, and needs. It also enables the brand to create targeted messages that resonate with customers.
Source: Aha
- Competitor analysis
It is essential to know what other options your customers are considering for the products you offer. This template allows you to identify your competitors and rank them to see where you fit in the overall market. It will give you an idea of the strategies you need to embrace to outdo your competitors.
Source: Aha
- Market analysis
The timing of your marketing moves is vital. Many market factors can negatively impact your efforts. Thus, you should always do market analysis before finalizing a strategy. This template uses Porter’s 5 Forces model to assess threats that are beyond your control.
Source: Aha
Conclusion
These are just a few marketing strategy templates available to help brands carve out a perfect and comprehensive marketing strategy for themselves.
The importance of a marketing strategy cannot be overstated. Try to start without it, and you will know how overwhelming and confusing everything can be.
Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. Here, preparing a marketing strategy is sharpening the axe.