The marketing field is constantly getting noisier, with more and more channels and tactics popping up every year in an effort to better connect with customers.
But as a marketer, all that clutter can be confusing. How can you keep your focus on your customers — and not on the latest marketing buzzwords?
Put simply, you need a marketing strategy plan. Like, right now.
By following a few simple steps, you can start outlining and sharing your marketing strategy plan right away. That’s what this guide will do for you.
Along the way, we’ll show you how to use these principles for marketing strategies with 3 different goals — and we’ll give you some insider tips for how staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud can make it all easier for you.
Essentials of a successful marketing strategy plan
Let’s start with the basics of every marketing strategy plan.
There are a few core steps you’ll need to take every time you create a new marketing strategy plan, no matter how many new channels and tactics appear.
1.Define your marketing goals and objectives. Are you trying to increase awareness and engagement? Or are you focusing on generating leads? Your goal will impact the channels and tactics you use, as well as the specific marketing KPIs you’ll track.
2.Choose or create your buyer personas. Understanding your target audience is crucial for any marketing plan. Decide which existing personas you want to reach with your plan, or develop new personas if you need them.
3.Decide on your marketing channels. The right channels for your marketing strategy depend on your goals and target audience.
4.Set your marketing budget. Your budget helps you know how much you can reasonably accomplish in a given time frame.
5.Assign roles and set deadlines. Outline each piece of your marketing plan and break it into manageable tasks. You can use a marketing plan template — like the staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud one shown below — to help you track tasks and balance workloads.
6.Review your KPIs and adjust as needed. As you carry out your marketing strategy, it’s important to regularly review your KPIs to make sure you’re on track to meet your marketing objectives.
You can build a marketing dashboard to give you a quick snapshot of how your campaign is performing. Optimize and adjust your plan as you go to give you the best results.
Keep in mind that you’ll likely need a portfolio of marketing strategies to cover all of your channels, demographics, and goals. These strategies work together to reach your entire target audience at every point of the customer journey.
To help you see what we mean, we’re going to apply these essential principles to 3 different types of marketing plans:
- Social media
- Lead generation
- Content marketing
Get started with staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud
How do I create a social media marketing strategy?
Social media use has been increasing steadily for years, with a current average of 144 minutes per day.
And, it changes quickly, so you have to be ready to pivot as soon as your target audience decides that Instagram is out and [insert-latest-social-media-trend-here] is in.
With a strategic marketing plan, however, you can get ahead of these challenges right away.
1. Set social media marketing goals.
Once again, you’ll need to decide on your marketing goals. What actions do you want your customers to take when they see your marketing content?
Your social media marketing objective will help you choose the right platform and brainstorm the best content. It also helps you choose the right KPIs to track your success.2. Understand your target audience.
Social media is really good for catering to very specific segments of your target audience. That’s why you’ll want to know exactly who you’re trying to reach before you make any other decisions about your marketing strategy.
94% of marketers used Facebook as a primary marketing channel in 2020. But Facebook’s popularity doesn’t mean it’s automatically the best choice for meeting your social media marketing objectives.
If you’re targeting Gen Z, you’ll find that less than 80% of them use Facebook regularly, but more than 90% use YouTube regularly.
Thankfully, demographic data for social media platforms is pretty easy to find and use. It doesn’t take long to figure out the best place to find your target audience online.
3. Choose your social media platforms.
With your marketing goals, audience and competitor research ready-to-go, you can now choose which social media platforms make the most sense for your marketing strategy.
In some cases, you might just need one platform to run a very targeted and specific campaign.
Other times, you might post similar content across multiple channels to broaden your reach.
When you need multiple channels, you’ll want to track them very carefully to make sure you post the right content to the right channels.
(Pro tip: Color-coding your social media platforms in a marketing plan template like this one makes this a lot easier.)
4. Brainstorm and create engaging content.
Now’s the time to put all that knowledge and research to good use. You need to craft content that will attract the right people on the right platform.
Depending on your goals, budget, and brand identity — and a lot of other things — your social media content can take on dozens of different forms.
You might curate a series of witty tweets to attract organic attention. Or maybe you put together some educational slides for your Instagram stories or ads.
You can even align your social media content with your content marketing strategy to get the most out of your marketing efforts.
When you’re creating a ton of content or collaborating with other teams, it’s really helpful to have a single point of reference for everyone involved.
A marketing team can use a tool like this one, built on staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, to create a request form for social media content or other creative needs.
The team that receives the request will then have all the necessary information to create the right content by the deadline.
5. Continually reassess and reoptimize
We’re going to say this a lot, so just bear with us (and let it sink in):
You always — always — need to track your progress for any marketing strategy.
This is especially important for a digital marketing strategy, because it’s never too late to make changes and improve your results.
Not getting enough engagement? Track engagement at different times throughout the day and adjust your posting schedule.
Not seeing enough conversions? Tweak your ad copy or landing page to boost your numbers.
No matter what your marketing goals, you’ll be able to track your marketing strategy and optimize regularly to get the best return on investment.
How do I create a lead generation marketing strategy?
It’s time to switch gears a little.
Where social media marketing is fast-moving and always changing, lead generation tactics often move a bit more slowly.
But that doesn’t mean you don’t need a marketing strategy plan to generate leads.
Lead generation requires the same basics that any marketing plan does…
1. Cover the basics
A lead generation strategy should start with the same first steps any marketing strategy does: define your goals, research your audience, and choose your marketing channels.
Because lead generation can be so broad, you’ll have a bit more research to do at this stage. You might need a variety of different channels to get prospects to the right point of the sales funnel.
And since lead generation is more common for B2B sales, you might need target market research that includes information on a prospect’s organization, not just the prospect themselves.
2. Create lead magnets
A lead magnet is an offer — a valuable piece of content, a free trial to a tool, or something similar — that people can access in exchange for their email address or other information.
It’s a sort of trade, in a way. You want their personal information so you can pull them into their sales funnel, so you have to make the first move. You need to give your future customers a very good reason to give you their email.
Lead magnets are the foundation of your lead generation strategy. They should be perfectly catered to your target audience and marketing goals.For instance, staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud’s “Working from Home” ebook is a prime example of a lead magnet targeting our ideal user:
The type of lead magnet you create really depends on your channels and audience.
For example, 55% of B2B marketers say articles are the most effective type of content for generating leads via email, but for social media, 61% of marketers say video is most effective.
3. Create and optimize landing pages
Once you’ve developed your lead magnets, you’ll need to create the landing pages where your audience will find and receive your offer.
Good landing pages are short and to the point. They present a clear offer with good value, and make it easy for prospects to sign up/download the article/redeem the coupon/etc.
Something like this…
Great landing pages are eye-catching and personalized. They keep visitors on the page until they absorb all the content and take the desired action.
4. Develop a lead scoring system
Lead scoring is a way to quantify when a prospect is close to making a purchase. It can help you see the success of your marketing strategy and allocate more resources toward prospects that are most likely to convert.
A lead scoring system assigns a point value to each action a prospect takes. Opening an email might be 1 point, while filling out a form or downloading a white paper might be 5 points.
You can build a lead scoring system — or other ways to track leads — in staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud which can work as a CRM in addition to all the other uses we’ve mentioned.
In this template, you can see the status of each lead indicated as hot, warm, or cold.
5. Nurture leads
There’s no point in generating a lead unless you have a strategy in place to turn them into a sale.
At certain points, you might consider sending a follow up email, offering a deal or coupon, or using other engagement tactics to turn a cold lead into a hot one, and a hot one into a sale through a well-timed email or call.
How do I create a content marketing strategy?
Content marketing is a strategy in its own right, but it also often plays a foundational role in other marketing strategies as well.
Lead magnets, social posts, email copy, and so much more are all part of a content marketing strategy. Good content can attract customers, establish your credibility as a brand, and increase profits and sales.
Let’s see how our marketing strategy essentials work for content marketing.
1. Outline your business objective for your content
Do you want to build credibility and trust in your brand? Are you trying to go viral? Do you want to prove that you are the expert in this niche?
All of these are possible objectives for your content marketing strategy. As with the other strategies we’ve covered, the objective will affect your channels, type of content, and success metrics.
2. Know your audiences and marketing channels
Like social media, there are dozens of types of content — and dozens of places to distribute it. That’s why research on your target market, preferred channels, and top competitors continues to be super important.
A 5,000-word white paper isn’t going to work for your Instagram audience. And 30-second animated videos probably aren’t the most effective approach for boosting your Google search rankings.
3. Figure out what content will work best for you
Based on your audience research, you can start defining the exact types of content that make the most sense for your marketing goals.
Because different marketing channels often have wildly different definitions of the best content for that channel, it’s also worth thinking about how to repurpose content so it meets the needs of multiple customer segments.
For instance, you’ll probably want to post that 5,000-word white paper on LinkedIn or send it in an email. But you can also tweet excerpts, create an infographic, or publish a short video summary that’s easier to share.
The more ways you can use a single content idea, the more efficient your marketing team will be.
4. Create a content or editorial calendar
Next, decide what content will be created and when.
If you’re creating content for multiple channels, be sure to note the differences in these pieces and if they’ll be published on the same day or not.
Keep in mind that you’ll likely need to collaborate with different teams to pull this off.
You might need to align your publishing schedule with the social media team, or make sure the design team has the same assets as the writing team so content is consistent across the board.
This is where a single source of truth like staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud comes in handy. With its editorial calendar templates, multiple teams can access the same schedule or resources to create a cohesive content marketing strategy.
5. Distribute, promote, and track content
Now, just stick to your content schedule. Publish content at the right cadence, and promote it across your different platforms as your content marketing plan recommends.
And, as always, track your progress and pivot where you need to!
Make sure you’re collaborating with all teams involved in your content marketing strategy to get the best results.
Marketing plan templates and more from staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud
You’ve seen how staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud can adapt to any marketing strategy plan you create. It can help you collaborate with any team, even working as a CRM for your sales and marketing teams to share.
But there are a few other things worth mentioning too.
For instance, staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud has tons of integrations that help you truly perform all of your work in one place.
You can integrate tools like Mailchimp and Facebook Ads to keep your marketing work in the same place as your project management.
With Zapier, you can get even more integrations, like Google Analytics to populate your marketing dashboards.
The last crucial staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud feature? Automations.
staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud has plenty of automation recipes to help manual processes go more quickly. It’s key for marketing, where you’ll want to ensure emails are sent or content is posted at the right time.
And when you’re collaborating with other teams, like sales, staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud can move prospects through the sales funnel automatically, assigning tasks to a new team or employee the moment a new tactic is needed.
Create a marketing strategy plan today
A good marketing strategy plan is both comprehensive and adaptable.
It’s rooted in research and best practices, but built on a framework that allows for adjustments and optimizations at any point.
staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud can adapt to and track any type of marketing strategy plan you create, from social media to lead generation and more. Try staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud today and see just how easy it is to create your next marketing plan.
Get started