Strategic marketing campaigns are essential for businesses to reach their goals of increasing brand awareness and driving conversions. Without marketing, companies would cease to exist, because not only does marketing create brand visibility, it also drives sales.
That’s why brands must invest considerable time, effort, and resources into creating a solid marketing plan that employs leading tactics to boost business. Strategic marketing can help enterprises of all sizes, and across industries, differentiate themselves from the competition and provide value to their audiences and stakeholders.
Let’s dive into what strategic marketing is, why it’s essential, what trends you need to incorporate, and how strategic marketing benefits businesses (when its executed in the right way!).
An effective strategic marketing plan will create brand awareness, generate leads, and ultimately convert qualified leads into customers. But without the right components, your attempts to boost your business could go bust. That’s why you need to understand and incorporate the essential parts of a practical strategic marketing blueprint.
There’s intense competition in the marketplace, and your prospects see thousands of advertising messages every day. It can be difficult for businesses to stand out and get the attention of their target audience – but it isn’t impossible.
Marketers have two distinct pathways through which they can communicate their brand’s message: inbound marketing and outbound marketing.
Outbound marketing is a traditional approach to pushing out your product’s information to prospects, hoping that it will reach the right audience and result in sales. It does not necessarily involve technology, but it strives to create brand awareness in very little time. This might happen through conventional advertising, such as print ads or billboards.
On the other hand, inbound marketing works subtly to gain the interest of a prospect. It educates buyers and provides them value–instead of blatantly promoting products in a sea of messages. This approach prioritizes the customer’s best interests, and businesses use it to build stronger relationships with their existing and prospective customers.
Both approaches have their benefits, but ultimately, you’ll need to choose the best marketing strategy that aligns with your business goals.
A successful strategic marketing plan includes an effective advertising strategy.
Whether you choose to use digital advertising approaches or more conventional advertising, or a blend of both, what matters most is how audiences are most likely to respond.
When creating your brand’s advertising strategy, your company’s values must be kept in mind. If it’s not on brand, your audiences definitely won’t respond. After that, determine your advertising campaign budget, since that directly influences the channels you’ll use to promote your brand.
Additionally, your budget will also determine the frequency of your ads to extract maximum ROI.
The main goal of your advertising strategy should be to gain as much exposure as possible to your target audience. The more potential customers who see your brand’s message, the more leads you will generate.
Businesses are increasingly adopting inbound marketing strategies. But it can be difficult for managers to decide if they should have an in-house inbound marketing team or hire an agency to execute their campaigns.
Our take: You specialize in what you do for a reason. Keep doing what you’re great at and leave your marketing to the experts!
Content marketing no longer remains an option for businesses. High-quality, original content has become a necessity for brands that want to thrive in the digital space. Content marketing has the power to increase brand awareness, attract organic traffic to your websites, and generate more leads.
The formula for a successful content marketing campaign is to post quality, consistent content through blogs, articles, social media posts, and videos or podcasts that are niche-specific and targets a distinct audience. Then, your content should be promoted through social media channels, digital advertising, and e-newsletters to make sure it’s being read and seen.
If you do not measure your ROI, you don’t have a good sense of whether your strategic marketing is working. Start the process by clarifying your goals and streamlining your processes; then ensure a successful implementation and execution of your strategic marketing plan. This process is crucial to evaluate its effectiveness through campaign ROI.
Then, you can evaluate your strategic marketing campaign ROI through a simple formula.
(Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = ROI
Add up all the expenditures and revenues for the marketing team, internal expenses, fees, and any other expenses incurred during marketing. Now subtract this number from the sales that occurred due to these marketing efforts.
There are other formulas to calculate marketing ROI. Still, those depend on specific strategic aims of the marketing campaign, such as calculating the increase in sales or determining the value of each customer’s relationship with your business.
Inbound marketing helps brands enhance their digital footprint by presenting products and services to customers who are already looking for similar offers.
Inbound marketing matters for businesses. Here’s why.
Digital marketing is a form of strategic marketing that helps businesses reach their target audience through mediums that are more effective and impactful than traditional marketing. If your company does not have a digital marketing strategy in place, you are missing out on a broad audience base.
You can take advantage of digital marketing to maximize marketing efforts through the following approaches:
A digital marketing strategy that encompasses some or all of these tactics all is the ultimate way to effectively promote your brand’s products and services to a wide range of audiences.
Content marketing is possibly the most effective digital marketing strategy for businesses. There are six main types of content marketing that you can use to engage your targeted audience and boost your brand’s image:
By using each of these formats, or by repurposing content across these formats in different ways, you can engage leads and boost online activity or sales for your business.
Why SEO and Content Marketing are a Perfect Match
No matter how informative and engaging your blogs are, new customers won’t be able to find you unless your content is ranking on Google. That’s why it is crucial to optimize your content for search engines with appropriate SEO tactics. The only way to attract leads is by leveraging the power of SEO for your website.
SEO and content marketing work hand-in-hand to enhance the effectiveness of your digital market campaigns. Here’s what you can expect.
While there is no denying the benefits, it is also important to remember that you won’t see the results of your SEO and content integration strategy overnight. Be consistent, continually refine your SEO tactics and content creation, and also keep up-to-date with the latest trends to get the most from this strategy.
Businesses are deviating from traditional marketing tactics to inbound marketing since it helps them form long-term, mutually-beneficial relationships with their prospects.
But that’s not all–there are numerous benefits of inbound marketing, including:
Traditional approaches would at-best get them one-off sales, but inbound has the power to deliver loyal, repeat customers.
Digital marketing can be overwhelming for businesses that are turning to it now, after working with more traditional methods for decades. Better late than never, because it is essential to embrace these new tools and strategies if you want to gain an advantage over your competitors.
These are the top digital marketing trends that you can incorporate in your company’s marketing mix.
Streamline your digital marketing processes with these tips:
To budget for your strategic marketing efforts, you need to consider all the costs for every marketing effort you plan on implementing. Here are some ways to maximize the budget for your strategic marketing efforts.
Stories help customers to relate to a brand, and when it comes to strategic marketing, businesses are maximizing on this opportunity to create content marketing campaigns that, ultimately, convert customers.
Content marketing is, by far, the best opportunity to write a captivating brand story that aligns with your customers’ values and touches their lives in meaningful ways.
Leverage different content marketing platforms and keep the following elements in mind when creating an engaging brand story.
The road to an effective strategic marketing strategy is full of challenges that can derail your efforts if ignored. These marketing problems include generating new leads, limitations of a marketing budget, attracting the wrong customer base, intense competition, or mixing your marketing approach.
But these difficulties can be diminished by precise strategic marketing solutions that involve improving the quality and reach of your content to grow and nurture leads.
It’s also a good idea to use a combination of outbound and inbound marketing campaigns to balance the budget. Creating a specific buyer persona and appealing to the individual needs of a customer will also help you solve these marketing problems.
Here are some of the leading strategic marketing trends for 2020!
Strategic marketing plays a vital role in lead generation and conversions. Getting this right means leveraging social media marketing platforms to engage customers and build your brand’s credibility.
Google Ads is also an excellent way to re-engage visitors by introducing your product ads whenever they search online.
And, another useful tool is email marketing. Email marketing plays a vital role in lead generation and conversion. Send promotional emails with a call-to-action button that appeals to the customer to take immediate action.
Many brands are confused about how to choose the best strategic marketing agency. It is essential to understand that the right agency perfectly aligns with the values and culture of your company, and that is crucial for your brand’s success.
Before signing a contract, make sure that you can communicate your goals with them. Furthermore, you must check references provided by other clients they have worked with and assess if they are the right fit for your business and marketing goals.
Social media offers an effective platform for brands to build long-term relationships with their customers, enhance their brand’s image, and increase their credibility.
Social media marketing can also increase customer interaction, augmenting the effectiveness of business marketing strategies and boosting sales for a brand.
When it comes to strategic marketing trends, the future belongs to businesses that are invested in creating more personalized and enhanced customer experiences. This should help them establish a genuine connection and reduces client acquisition costs.
Moreover, AI and automation technology will continue to further enhance the marketing tactics this year with increased improvements in customer retention strategy.
By integrating SEO tactics in your content marketing strategy, you get to tell an engaging brand story that is visible to the customers who search for you online. It is imperative to strike a balance between the two to produce an effective and comprehensive content marketing strategy.
Avoid generating content that is keyword-loaded and bland. Instead, tell your brand story in a way that creates an emotional appeal with your customers to give you a competitive edge. Then, your content should reflect the values of the company and leave a lasting impact on customers’ minds.
To make these strategies work, you need to analyze and understand your audience and encourage them to engage with the brand.
The success of a strategic marketing campaign requires achieving essential objectives. Here are some of the top strategic marketing goals to keep in mind.
Successful businesses utilize multiple marketing platforms to create a solid strategic marketing plan that actually works. Here are some brands that got it right:
Businesses need to realize that not every strategy works for everyone.
Most businesses expect to come up with innovative ideas quickly – they also believe that lead generation can happen automatically when they spread awareness about their products.
What they fail to realize is that no one can reap overnight results with an out-of-the-box idea or by generating vast amounts of content on all marketing platforms. It takes a strategy to ensure the success of a brand or business.
That’s why it is crucial to invest in customer-centric strategic marketing solutions to solve the problems of their businesses.
Strategic marketing helps businesses achieve their target revenues by enhancing customer experiences and ensuring consistency in their campaigns.
This definitive guide offers you in-depth guidance on how to wield the power of strategic marketing and use it to reach new audiences and boost your brand’s image.
For more advice on creating an effective strategic marketing plan that gives you a competitive edge, download our free e-book, Everything You Need to Know About Strategic Marketing. This free resource is full of expert, insider advice on everything you need to know about strategic marketing. Use our insight to plan for success and create a lasting impression on your audience. Download it now or reach out to C-leveled today!
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