5 Steps To Strategize Your Marketing Efforts For Success

All things considered, the final outcome of your marketing efforts principally depends on how you strategize everything.

However, and rather surprisingly, quite a number of businesses choose to proceed blindly.

Going by a report published by Smart Insights, as many as 46% of businesses are yet to develop a well-defined digital marketing strategy. And that’s not all. After extrapolating the data, it was further established that although 16% of the surveyed brands have a strategy, they have not been able to embed it into their corresponding marketing efforts.

So, to help you avoid that, here are five steps you should follow to strategize effectively:

Set Objectives

Start by determining what you seek to primarily achieve with your campaigns. This fundamentally defines the overall framework and direction your marketing should take.

That said, you should follow and a simple and systematic structure. Set the overriding goal, and then subsequently use it to outline all the corresponding objectives.

If you want to enhance the sales numbers, for instance, you might consider lead generation as one of the marketing objectives. This will, in turn, form the basis of establishing various prospecting strategies, and the tools required for each. You can check out this list of tools from Leadfeeder for lead generation specific ideas.

Assess the Data

Admittedly, digital marketing is an extensive field with infinite possible strategies. You’ll still have numerous options even after you’ve defined all the critical objectives.

The problem here is that it’s practically impossible to pursue everything concurrently. You’ll only be able to focus on a handful of strategies. That’s why, as a matter of fact, enterprises are only leveraging an average of eight marketing channels.

So, to avoid blind speculations, you should get to know how audiences respond to various strategies. Analyze past data on ROI plus various traffic metrics to get insights about the strengths and weaknesses of different tactics.

Ultimately, you’ll be able to zero in on the best possible marketing options.

Develop a Budget

By now, it’s pretty obvious that marketing costs money. In other words, the resources and tools you end up leveraging over the long haul depend on what you can afford to spend.

According to a study by Gartner Research, businesses making about $250 million to $500 million per year are spending about 10% of that revenue on marketing. Large enterprises generating more than $5 billion, on the other hand, use about 13%.

That said, a suitable marketing budget can only be developed after critically reviewing your overall business revenue, its resources, the general running costs, plus the pricing of various marketing tools you intend to adopt.

Consequently, use the findings to define strategies that your budget can accommodate, based on their cost range and ROI insights.

Create a Detailed Marketing Plan

Marketing strategies are best implemented when you follow a systematic plan. Each campaign should be rolled out methodically, in line with all the critical variables.

In essence, a good marketing plan should outline the strategies, objectives, budget, resources, and so forth. Most importantly, it should comprehensively break down each strategy into a structured action program.

Define Key Performance Indicators

You can only determine the success of your marketing efforts after tracking and measuring all the relevant parameters. That’s how you eventually get to rationalize the resources you spend, plus identify potential strengths and weaknesses.

Key performance indicators are usually defined after assessing each strategy holistically, particularly based on its target objectives, budget, action plan framework and the analytical capabilities of the tools you apply.

From the resultant metrics, you’ll eventually notice marketing success depends on not only your strategies but also your type of business.