Most marketing agencies follow a similar process for developing a marketing strategy. However, we do things a little differently at Divining Point.
Like most agencies, we pride ourselves on developing a marketing strategy for your company that is both meticulous and innovative. You’ve probably heard that before, so we understand why you may be skeptical. Agencies promise results, but do they really deliver?
But rather than trot out the usual prescriptions for every problem that comes before us, our process incorporates a deeper discovery to choose the right solution for each client’s unique needs. We incorporate data analysis, decades of experience, and an objective understanding about marketing to help our clients discover success. As a result, we produce robust strategies that truly work.**
Here are the steps we think are most important when developing a marketing strategy.
Understand Your Objectives
The road starts here. Setting your objectives and clearly defining success are the two most important parts of any marketing strategy. This should be your top priority.
We are proponents of S.M.A.R.T. goals: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Think of your objectives and then clearly define the goals in a way that allows you to not only pursue them, but also track outcomes that will reinforce your future plans.
It’s not enough to say “We need to increase sales”. By what percent? In what categories of products or services? At what price? How many conversions does that represent? How soon do you need them?
Fully defining your goals will help you determine how to move forward with your entire marketing plan.
Assess Your Marketing History
This is a step that we feel is often overlooked.
We review a client’s marketing history to evaluate what has worked, what hasn’t, and what strategies haven’t been explored yet. If you’ve attempted marketing before with little success, do you know why it didn’t work? Were there any positive outcomes at all?
We take this step so we can avoid past mistakes while also building on successful tactics. If data is available, we review it to see what has driven success and what hasn’t. We identify patterns and insights that inform our strategy, ensuring that every decision is data-driven and backed by solid evidence.
When developing your strategy, you may discover helpful kernels of information that can contribute to future success. Don’t pass off your past marketing efforts simply because you didn’t get what you wanted out of it.
Explore Your Customer Base
A thorough understanding of your current customer base is crucial. Setting your target audience will help you create messaging that is tailored to them. It also allows you to determine which tactics will successfully reach your ideal customer.
We analyze your existing audience and explore opportunities to expand your reach to new customer segments, ensuring your brand resonates with a wider range. There may be (usually are) segments of your target audience where there are opportunities for growth. It pays to identify them.
Would you believe that we frequently run across clients who think they know their customers but then discover that the data doesn’t support their assumptions? It happens.
As you create your marketing strategy you should validate your understanding about your current customers and explore the data (if available) to see where there are opportunities to expand your audience.
You should review all available data (either online or in your CRM) to get a greater understanding about the needs of your customers and how to reach them. Without that information, you should expect to run marketing tests (trial and error) to fully define them. That can be costly and time consuming.
Do Competitor Analysis
Who are your direct competitors? Who are the big players in your industry? Which upstarts (like you) are trying to gain market share? By understanding who you’re competing against you can learn how your Unique Value Proposition compares to theirs and determine if there are ways to beat them.
We conduct a detailed review of your competitors, both within your territory and beyond. If possible, we like to know their strategies, strengths, and weaknesses to help us position your brand more effectively in the market. It also allows us to identify tactics they may not be using – but are relevant – to grab the attention of potential customers.
Fortunately on the tactical level there are tools that will immediately identify competitors. It’s incredibly rare for an SEO or PPC campaign to not have other players competing for the same keywords as you. In most cases you can even identify the keyword sets and landing pages they’re using to sell to your target audience.
Develop Your PLAN
With all this information in hand, you can develop a comprehensive marketing plan. This includes a mix of tactics designed to meet your objectives and drive your campaigns to the public. Your strategies should be customized to your specific needs and goals, ensuring maximum impact.
That means you’ll need to understand how to position your products and services in ways that fully define you while at the same time attracting customers into your sales funnel. Branding, messaging, and campaign creation arise from this strategy.
Remember your goals above? If the objective is to sell a certain product to a specific slice of your target audience, you can leverage this information to develop the plan to the public. It’s at this stage that you will select the marketing tactics required to not only reach your customers but also give you measurable data to make improvements along the way.
For example, if you’re selling an expensive service for high net worth individuals, the tactics you choose and your messaging will be radically different than a less expensive service for medium income levels. Furthermore, whichever tactic you use, you should define how to measure results and gauge your return on investment.
Set Marketing Budget & Timeline
Frankly, the marketing budget is everyone’s least favorite aspect of the process.
In a client / agency relationship, clients tend to hide their budget or try to set the smallest budget possible.
With internal marketing teams, stakeholders expect more for less.
There are countless reasons for the lack of transparency. In some cases, companies are not sure how much they should spend on marketing. In other cases, the company may be strapped for funding… or they may just be incredibly frugal. In rarer cases still, some companies are incredibly private and don’t trust their marketing teams with large sums of money.
Here’s the deal: you have to pay to play.
There are rare cases where you can get by (or get lucky) with small marketing budgets. But most companies are spending between 5%-20% of revenue on marketing. This number needs to be divided between all marketing expenditures, which means any new marketing strategy will be less than your total marketing costs unless you plan on adding new budget.
If you’re doing any kind of advertising, whether digital or traditional, you can expect to make an upfront investment just to get the wheels rolling. The good news is that advertising can help you thrive and quickly achieve new sales. The bad news is that you will experience wasted spend if your website or sales process is not ready to convert new leads.
Performance Tracking and Optimization
We believe in the power of data to continually refine and optimize our efforts. If your goals are measurable and if your tactics reward you with performance data, you should be able to track the success of your marketing efforts. Use this information as much as possible.
As part of our setup process, we ensure all performance data is tracked and analyzed. This ongoing evaluation allows us to tweak and enhance campaigns in real-time, ensuring they consistently deliver the best possible results. You may even have to invest in additional tracking tools, but the added expense is worth every penny.
Your performance data can also be used to identify a variety of other opportunities, weaknesses, or breakdowns in your sales process.
We view the marketing strategy as an iterative process. Once you go through the above steps, the performance data can then be used to improve the plan and/or create new strategies for future growth. If you don’t know how to use this data, you will spend vast sums of money on marketing and never realize your fullest potential.
Choosing a Marketing Partner
No blog is complete without a bit of self promotion. Forgive us for the plug:
At Divining Point, we don’t just create marketing plans; we build dynamic, data-driven strategies that evolve with your business and the market landscape. Our approach ensures that every aspect of your marketing is finely tuned to achieve your goals and drive your success.
Do you have a tough business challenge to tackle? Contact us, and let’s do great things together.
** Some clients come to us with a strategy already in place but no provider to manage tactics. Of course, we work in limited capacities guided by a pre-existing strategy. However, for those cases where a client comes to us without a plan, we will diagnose the challenges within the current marketing approach (or lack thereof) and develop a robust strategy to deliver results.