Rethink’s Guide to Building a Winning Marketing Strategy

In today’s competitive landscape, having a solid marketing strategy can very often be the tool that enables your business to stand out from the crowd.  A strategy can also be the key to reducing marketing budgets through focus and consistency in place of a scattergun approach.  But it can be overwhelming to know where to start, even for seasoned marketers.  

To start off our 2024 blog series, we’ve put together some tips on how to build a marketing strategy – from understanding your audience to defining your core values…

MARKETING STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT

Step 1: Know Your Business Inside and Out

To build a robust marketing strategy, you need to look from the inside out.  Developing a deep understanding of your strengths and weaknesses will enable you to build a strategy that resonates with your ideal clients.  

These are just some of the questions that we’d recommend you answering:-

• WHERE ARE YOU NOW? – profitability / breakdown of customers / sources of new business / current marketing activity / products & services offered / expertise within the business
• YOUR COMPETITORS? direct and indirect competitors / their strengths and weaknesses
• STAKEHOLDER FEEDBACK (Management and employees) This is particularly useful with customer facing stakeholders as they’ll have first-hand insights into positive feedback and pain points.
• WHERE DO YOU WANT TO BE? – business objectives / financial targets / growth aspirations

Step 2: Know Your Audience Inside and Out

Buyer Personas

Before you can craft any messages or campaigns, you need to understand who you’re trying to reach. This is where buyer personas come in. These semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers help you pinpoint their demographics, interests, pain points, and buying behaviours.  

One of the easiest ways to build these profiles is to look at your existing customer base and identify the key characteristics of the customers that you wish you could clone.  These characteristics could be anything from profitability, through to ease of working with them and the length of the decision-making process…

Capture Customer Feedback

What do your customers actually think?  Where possible we would highly recommend speaking directly to customers as the insights that they can give are invaluable in terms of correcting weaknesses and identifying key strengths. Any information gathered can be used to build testimonials and form the foundation of your overall strategy. 

• What’s important to them?  
• Why did they choose your product or service over your competitors?
• How did they rate the customer journey? strengths / areas for improvement / comparison to previous experiences with competitors…
• What are their preferred methods of marketing communication? Enables you to define your marketing channels

Step 3. SWOT Analysis

The information above can then be used to create a full SWOT analysis identifying STRENGTHS, WEAKNESSES, OPPORTUNITIES, and THREATS.

The opportunities section should shine a light on promising external trends and situations like rising market demand, emerging technologies, potential partnerships, or changes in regulations that could benefit your business. In contrast, the threats section should delve into external challenges that could hinder your progress. Examples include new competitors, economic downturn, or resource scarcity.  Both of these sections should focus on factors outside of your direct control but with the potential to significantly impact your business.

Step 4 : Build the Foundations to Your Strategy

Completing steps 1 and 2 will help you to identify the priorities of the business and your customers, making it easier to build the following: 

• VALUE PROPOSITION Define your value proposition by encapsulating your product / service and personality into a simple strapline that can be used across all business communication.
• BOILERPLATE Extend your value proposition into a paragraph that sums up the business whilst highlighting the key USP’s.  The easiest way to think about the boilerplate is by answering the question ‘How would you like people to describe your business and your product or service?’ 
• CORE VALUES You can build your core values using the feedback from management and employees, alongside the strengths that have been identified by customers. It’s imperative that these are honest values that the business lives and breathes by. We would always recommend using an internal working party to support their development and to give final approval.  In their simplest form, examples of values are honesty and integrity, innovation, teamwork & collaboration, diversity and accountability.  The key words should be supported by a brief summary of how these values are reflected in your workplace culture. 
• VISION & MISSION Last but not least is the finalising of a vision and mission.  Alongside the core values, these are fundamental to decision making.  Once the business stakeholders have agreed the core values and vision & mission, they should be used as a reference for decisions to ensure that any plans and changes align with these commitments.

Your vision paints a picture of what the organisation hopes to achieve in the long term.

Your mission is a concise and clear statement that defines why your organisation exists and what it does to achieve its purpose. It captures the core values, goals, and principles that guide the organisation’s actions and decisions.

By following these steps, you can build a marketing strategy that lays the groundwork for your full marketing plan, featuring tactics and marketing channels for the next 6-12 months.  

We’ll be sharing ideas on how to build a plan to drive results and achieve business objectives within our next blog.

In the meantime, if you need any support with your marketing planning, and/or implementation give us a call on 01737 428169 or email hello@wearerethink.uk