6 Basic Components Every Successful Marketing Strategy Needs

A marketing strategy is necessary for all businesses. Today we explain the concept of marketing strategies, why your business needs one, and the main components of a successful strategy.

What is a marketing strategy?

Investopedia defines this strategy as “a business’ overall game plan for reaching people and turning them into customers.” This should be a high-level document that outlines your key marketing messages and how you’re going to implement and track these messages.

Why do you need a marketing strategy?

The concept behind a marketing strategy is for a business to formulate their goals into an action plan. You need a strategy so that the tasks you delegate to a marketing team have meaning. With a strategy in place, you’re working towards a goal. Without a strategy there is no end game, which makes it incredibly difficult to track success.

6 components in every successful marketing strategy

When we complete marketing strategies for clients, we make sure to include these six components.

1. Research

In order to find the best route to your end goal, you must research where you’re starting. Ask key questions like:

• Who are your existing clients?
• Why do they seek out your organization?
• What are your competitors doing?
• Where are you already seeing success and where are the biggest areas of opportunity?

A successful marketing strategy will include internal research of your company, and external research of your competitors and industry. SWOT analyses are always helpful, as they identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Your strategy can make a hypothesis based on this research.

2. Buyer Personas

Personas turn demographic research into semi-fictitious human representations of current and ideal customers. You can give them a name, identify consistent pain points, determine how to solve their unique problems, and figure out what marketing channels they prefer to receive information.

A full persona may include:

• Background information
• Demographic data
• Goals
• Identifiers
• Challenges
• Objections

Read our full guide to creating agile buyer personas here.

3. Analysis

A great strategy will make it simple to analyze success. Set benchmarks for success now to measure success later. Identify not only benchmarks, but also key performance indicators (KPIs), like the number of visits to your website and the average amount of time visitors spend on your website.

4. Implementation

The groundwork has been completed and it is now time to execute the strategy. If an outside agency is working on this strategy, they will need clients to provide:

• Design feedback
• Necessary content
• Asset delivery

Clients should have the option to implement the strategy themselves or outsource those tasks to the agency.

5. Post Mortem

How did the implementation and original hypotheses hold up?  You could answer questions like:

• Are email open rates increasing?
• Is social media driving more website traffic?
• Is the website seeing an increased conversion rate?

The post mortem component dedicates time to buttoning up outstanding questions and requesting service feedback from the client and/or agency.

6. Continuous Improvement

A great strategy leaves room for continuous improvement. You need to validate or invalidate the assumptions made in the current strategy. If aspects of the strategy failed – why? You can improve what isn’t working or abandon it for a new tactic. Continual improvement means your return on investment (ROI) is consistently tracked. You have to look at long-term numbers to see if a strategy had a positive result. This is a key component of a science-based approach to marketing.

Does your business need a marketing strategy?

Hire experts with an unbiased view of your business and industry to put together a comprehensive marketing strategy. Get a free consultation from a Quantum Dynamix marketing expert today!