How to plan a Comprehensive Marketing Strategy?

Einstein once said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”

He was absolutely right. The right planning and strategy can save a ton of time in execution and delivering results.

HubSpot’s blog has a fantastic, in-depth article on marketing strategy. I liked it so much that all the headings of this post are taken from that article. You can take this post as a quick summary of that post.

1. Marketing Mix

The 4 P’s of marketing form the foundation of a marketing strategy

• Product — What product are you marketing?
• Price — What is your product’s price?
• Place — Where will you be marketing?
• Promotion — How will you be marketing?

To answer Place and Promotion, ask these three million-dollar questions to refine your strategy:

1. Where is our customer?
2. Which platforms do they hang out on?
3. Where do they go to solve their problems?

2. Marketing Objectives

What do we really want? Marketing objectives answer this question.

We can have broader objectives for cross-channel marketing and specific objectives for each channel. It depends on our current priorities and goals.

Examples include:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Getting more leads
• Driving more sales
• Increasing revenue
• Boosting website traffic
• Growing social media engagement and followers
• Increasing market share
• Reaching more visitors through organic search
• Establishing industry authority

3. Marketing Budget

Without adequate resources, we can’t accomplish our goals.

Budget allocation should include:

• Hiring or investing in the right talent
• Ad budget
• Tools and software
• Developing marketing content (blogs, graphics, videos)

How much budget is sufficient?

That depends on your company’s stage and priorities. In a nutshell, whatever you can allocate at this stage, you should do that.

4. Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis can be done by:

• Using tools like SimilarWeb
• Reading comments on competitors’ social media
• Reviewing their ads and landing pages
• Reading Amazon reviews (for e-commerce products)
• Checking Quora and Reddit discussions
• Reading industry articles from credible publications

5. Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning (STP)

Here’s how to break it down:

1) Segmentation:

• Demographics: Age, gender, education, location, profession
• Psychographics: Priorities, personality traits, beliefs, values
• Lifestyle traits: Hobbies, entertainment preferences, non-work activities
• Behavior: Shopping habits

2) Targeting:

Buyer personas

3) Positioning:

• What differentiates us in the market?
• Why would someone buy from us?

6. Content Creation

Once we’ve followed the above steps, we need content to fulfill our marketing objectives. Quality content makes all the difference in building a winning brand.

Content can take many forms:

• Videos
• Images
• Blog posts
• E-books
• Case studies
• Podcasts

7. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Measurement

Whatever objectives we set in step 2, this is the time to measure them. Measuring our marketing activities shows how well we’ve met our objectives. This is our opportunity to reflect and adjust for better results.

Following this 7-step framework can help any brand create a comprehensive marketing strategy.