The importance of a clear and measurable marketing strategy for all businesses cannot be understated. But what is a ‘strategy’ exactly? And what’s the process behind creating one?
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“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Abraham Lincoln
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If you look closely behind any wonderful piece of creative, it’s likely that you’ll find an equally wonderful strategy. A good strategy is an amalgamation of intensive research, business understanding, and creative thinking, all combined to enable a brand to direct its resources towards the opportunities that will not only increase sales, but help them to achieve a sustainable advantage over the competition.
So a great strategy is a key part of any businesses marketing, but here at Chapter, how do we go about creating one, and how do we ensure it does our client justice?
1) Getting to Know You
Sadly when it comes to creating an impactful strategy, there’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution. Your products, services, customers, and even budgets are unique, and that’s why before we get to work on creating one, it’s important that we truly understand what drives a business. What are your goals, opportunities and challenges? Knowing what you’re trying to achieve is essential in order for us to make recommendations for your business.
2) Competitor and Market Research
The next step is to thoroughly understand the space that you’re operating. Who are the competitors and how are they performing? What are the trends in the market? Using various digital tools at our disposal we take a deep dive into your market to define, measure and quantify where the opportunities lie. We also get to grips with your customers and build user personas through social profiling, internal and external market research, and even customer surveys. This research helps us to identify their needs, desires, and truly understand how we can meet them.
3) Scope and Define
Now we’re in a position to get in to the detail. Here we get to grips with what your business KPIs are, and we detail the strengths and limitations within your business to understand the challenges we need to overcome. This work is essential to guiding a bespoke strategy focused on profitability and growth, and is a key part of the process.
4) Brand Positioning
So we understand where you want your brand to be. But does your positioning match your ambitions? Reviewing your branding and tone of voice helps us to detail your mission, value, purpose and vision. These elements help us to ensure that everything that we’re saying and doing from a marketing perspective is truly representative, and does justice for your brand.
5) Marketing Strategy
The work to date is the foundation for which is our brand strategy is built. The strategy combines the market research with our agreed goals and KPIs, it reflects the brand positioning, look, feel and tone of voice at all times, and essentially organises the channels and activities that will be best suited to achieving these goals. But most importantly, it outlines just how we plan to achieve to a profitable sales growth for your business. After all, that’s what we’re here for, right?
6) Marketing Budget and Plan
Then, it’s on to detailing the marketing budget and plan. This document is the blueprint that outlines your advertising and marketing efforts for the year ahead. It details your key business and calendar events, along with all marketing activities in a set time frame. This document also splits the agreed budget by month and activity, to ensure that our strategy and plan is both measurable and timely.
7) Evaluation and Review
And we’re not finished there… equally as important as all of the above work is the evaluation phase. What learnings can we take from our activities to date? How can we tweak and further tailor them to provide even more impact?
If you are interested in devising a new marketing strategy for your business, then get in touch with us today.