Marketing is necessary an essential component to growing and sustaining a business. It helps you reach and connect with your target audience and reconnect with existing customers. The conclusion is marketing is important and without it, your business simply will go nowhere because it won’t be seen.

But it’s one thing to market your business with no direction or plan, and it’s another thing to market your business with a coherent strategic plan. The results are quite different. This where a marketing strategy comes into play.

The Importance of a Marketing Strategy for Business

Many business owners haven’t discovered the importance of a marketing strategy. If you are in this group don’t worry you won’t be there much longer. In fact, having a marketing strategy is so useful that you can think of it as having a road map (or a cheat sheet). It will guide you in just about every business decision that you make once you have a strategy and plan in place.

But what exactly does a marketing strategy entail?

In short, your marketing strategy will highlight the path you’re taking to achieve your specific objectives and goals.
This may sound easier, and it is. But it’s not always easy to ask the hard questions that come with creating a marketing strategy.
And this is the major reason many businesses don’t recognize the importance of a marketing strategy.

Consequences of Not Having a Marketing Strategy

Remember that common saying? A failure to plan is a plan to fail. Businesses that cannot recognize the importance of a marketing strategy and don’t fully integrate digital marketing into their marketing plan, then these will be the consequences:

• Losing out to competitors
• Losing market share to existing and start-up competitors
• Gaining and keeping fewer customers
• Missing out on opportunities for better targeting and optimization

Lack of planning often leads to suboptimal execution or unprofitable results (low ROI). And finally, given the effectiveness of digital marketing, many businesses don’t allocate enough resources towards it which points to poor budgeting.

This presents an opportunity for a wise business owner such as yourself. Knowledge is power, and after you finish reading this post, your business will have a leg up over the competition. You’ll also be ready to overcome the initial hurdles that are common when trying to come up with a marketing strategy.

Challenges of Creating a Marketing Strategy

The most common challenge that business owners face when creating a marketing plan is “where do I start?” In fact, this is the most common obstacle for just about any goal in life, really. The scope and scale of digital marketing are quite large. In order to break it down, you must plan out a do-able number of digital marketing activities and campaigns that will fully cover the Customer Journey.

Along the way, you’ll discover tools, channels, and tactics for increasing sales and profits while beating the competition and the consumer objections at the same time. Standing out from your competitors and addressing consumer concerns or objections will depend heavily on how effective your marketing strategy is. A well-planned digital marketing strategy will help your brand highlight your strengths.

Sound good?

Below, you’ll learn more about how your business can benefit when you embrace the importance of a marketing strategy.

So let’s get right to it.

Importance of a Marketing Strategy for Businesses

1. Find Your Target Audience

It’s common marketing knowledge that you should create a marketing strategy focused on specific audiences and serving their needs. In order to do this, identify your target audiences’ interests and their pain points.

Do an assessment of your followers on social media or your current customer base. If you are just getting started try “eavesdrop” on social media to build up an accurate Buyer’s Persona. You need to uncover the customer’s raw emotions. Any tools or resources you have that capture feedback will be extremely helpful in this effort.

If you don’t intimately know who your target demographics are, you won’t know who your online audience is. Online communications based around your prospective customers will be different compared to your traditional marketing channels. If you don’t know who your online audience is, you won’t have an optimal digital marketing plan as the details help narrow your reach thereby optimizing your targeting. Each digital marketing platform has its own tools that will help you figure out customer interest.

2. Use The Proven SMART Strategy

SMART is a useful acronym to know in marketing, and it has taken on many but similar meanings over the years.

The traditional meaning of SMART is as follows:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Timely

Without a SMART marketing strategy, you'll struggle to reach your marketing goals. You’ll have no actionable path to follow for gaining new customers or maintaining relationships with existing ones.

Your goals must also be SMART-ly translated into marketing initiatives. Otherwise, you likely won’t put enough investment and resources into reaching your goals, or you’ll put your focus on the wrong things. That’s what happens when you don’t set goals and measure your success through metrics and analytics.

In order to be SMART, you must first be honest with yourself and with anyone you seek to advise or hire to assist you in reaching these goals. Perform the steps below to incorporate SMART goals into your marketing strategy: the importance of a marketing strategy.

Use the SMART approach with each goal!

Involve your business’s key stakeholders and ask and answer the following questions:

• what are your revenue goals for the year or for a single campaign?
• what percent of gross revenue can you afford to reinvest in obtaining a new customer or retaining an existing one?
• what is your average sale size and deal closing ratio?
• how many leads do you require to reach your goals?

3. Keep Everyone On The Same Page

One of the key parts of the importance of a marketing strategy is keeping everyone in the organization on the same page. This means that everyone should understand the marketing strategy - share the written plan.

When everyone is on the same page, your organization will also be able to effectively use the skills of all employees and stakeholders. In addition, it will keep the plan from evolving in the wrong direction.

But what happens when everyone isn’t on the same page? One word: Devolution.

What is devolution? In the worst sense, devolution means inefficiently moving backward away from the primary marketing strategy. Many mistakes evolving a plan as progress. It is not progressing if the new information for stakeholders or yourself was not identified in the planning process.

Devolution will waste your time and money. If you are resetting your strategy constantly and not driving toward obtaining your goals, devolution is probably happening.

Staying on the same page also means keeping everything integrated and collaborating. Using project planning tools like Asana helps key all stakeholders in the loop.

Streamlining and marketing automation also play a critical role in connecting stakeholders and their reporting, measuring, and monitoring tools together. This requires integration and embracing the importance of a marketing strategy for your business. Tools like Zapier helps bridge the gap between marketing tools and resources.

4. Keep Everything Timely and Executing with a schedule

Following the train of thought about keeping everyone on the same page, you also want to keep everyone on the same schedule and timeline. And you must create a timeline, deadlines, and deliverables list in order for this to work.
The importance of a marketing strategy is highlighted by the timeliness of its plans. If you don’t have the time or patience, then hiring a digital marketing agency is the best approach. We utilize tools like Asana to:

• Ensure constant attention and focus on a specific task
• Responding to questions and messages regarding a specific task.
• Responding to incoming feedback on marketing content from the targeted consumers.
• Always responding to feedback, whether good.
• Responding professionally.
• catching up with the newest trends or challenges.

When you’re committed to staying adaptable, then you’ll be all set on the path to optimization and evolution, not devolution.

And with the right marketing strategy, you’ll get the basics right. Then you can continue to improve upon the key aspects of your digital marketing strategy.

Now, to tie all this together, it’s of course essential to spell out dates/deadlines and your objectives. A good marketing plan has key performance indicators (KPIs). The KPI plan, which is included in your marketing plan, will not only include critical metric target points but also dates when key objectives should be reached. It’s best to do this on a marketing calendar. It will detail your timelines to achieve your objectives. You should check this calendar on a weekly basis at least.

Your list of tasks should address these 3 key aspects:

• Leadership roles for producers and reviewers in your objectives (project leader and followers of the task)
• Basic details of the campaign: a task title, key elements, target demographics, etc (you can flush out the rest of the details during the planning stage of the campaign)
• What are the key dates or sub-tasks should the initiative require multiple stages.

Conclusion of the importance of a marketing strategy

Whatever you choose to do, make sure it’s right for what your business offers to your target customer. Be authentic.

Benefits of making your brand more authentic online:

• attract the right customers to your business
• find the right marketing platforms and channels
• distinguish your unique selling point (USP) better
• define your customer value proposition (or why a consumer would benefit from purchasing your product or service)

The online marketplace is extremely competitive. Only by accepting the importance of a marketing strategy will you be able to come up with a plan that will help your business stand out in the crowd.

So, how do you do this?

Great question–here’s how.

It helps to have a very competitive content marketing strategy to stand out in the competitive online world. That’s because content is the best way to engage audiences on most digital marketing channels.

But when presenting your brand online, it’s important that you don’t do something that doesn’t resonate with your target audience.

That’s why, once again, it’s a good idea to delegate such tasks to a company that specializes in online presence management (hint hint - us).

Only a company that specializes in digital and content marketing will present your brand personality with consistency and authenticity of different digital marketing channels.

Let’s get started today. We have put together a simple strategic marketing planning worksheet. Complete this worksheet, we will review it and get you started on the journey of building a marketing strategy for your entire business or next campaign.

If you need help getting started, need it be budgeting, planning or even managing your digital marketing campaign from start to finish. Please schedule a focus-chat marketing planning Zoom session with our senior digital marketing advisor.