Welcome to this lesson of the Growth Hacking Academy, in which we’ll tackle marketing strategies. In a market as competitive and as fast-changing as today’s, being profitable and growing your business calls for the right commercial and marketing strategies, properly defined and implemented.
Online and offline marketing strategies, brand and digital strategies, B2B and B2C strategies — the types and the fields of application are countless. So how do you identify the ones that suit your business? Which marketing and communication strategies let you reach your target audience in the right way and at the right time? And exactly what is a marketing strategy, and how do you build one?
In this lesson we’ll answer all of that. Let’s begin.
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Marketing strategy: what is it?
What does marketing strategy mean? A marketing strategy is the overall plan of actions designed by a company or organisation in order to reach its medium- and long-term goals (promotion, sales, profit and so on).
What does a marketing strategy contain? It has to carry the value proposition and the key marketing messages, along with information about the target audience and other key elements.
Strategic marketing vs operational marketing
Marketing strategies belong to what’s called strategic marketing, whose purpose is identifying the competitive strategy best suited to reaching a company’s strategic objectives. Decisions are guided by the information analytical marketing provides.
The techniques and methods it uses include: market research, identifying profitable niches or segments, analysis of demand and of the competition, and studies of consumer behaviour.
Carrying those strategies out tactically belongs to operational marketing. In short, that’s McCarthy’s four Ps of the marketing mix and their evolutions (5P, 7P, 4C, 5A, 4E and so on). Together, strategic and operational marketing form the strategic instrument known as the marketing plan.
Why marketing strategies matter
Having covered exactly what a marketing strategy is, let’s see why defining one matters:
- it gives you a competitive advantage over the competition;
- it allows the development of products and services with high profit-growth potential;
- it helps the organisation find areas of growth within itself and build a business plan that meets customers’ needs;
- it allows proper positioning on the basis of market research;
- it allows better use of internal resources;
- it lets you reach your target audience in the right way and at the right time;
- it lets you set advertising budgets in advance and determine the results expected.
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How to build a marketing strategy
To be effective, marketing strategies need planning — the “where we are, what to do and how” of it. The marketer’s instrument for that is the marketing plan.
Philip Kotler, one of the fathers of modern marketing, describes the traditional marketing plan in “Marketing Management” as the instrument organisations use “to document how strategic objectives will be achieved through specific marketing strategies and tactics”.
Marketing plan vs business plan
The marketing plan shouldn’t be confused with the business plan, which is a wider-ranging document summarising the contents, elements and characteristics of a business idea and planning how it will be realised.
How to plan a marketing strategy
The structure of a marketing plan varies with a company’s size, culture and management. Still, as Alexander Chernev sets out in “Strategic Marketing Management”, it generally consists of at least these eight sections:
- Executive summary: a synthesis of the marketing plan setting out the objectives, the competitive landscape and the aspects of the action plan through which those objectives will be reached.
- Situation analysis: gives the manager information about the current position, both in relation to the company’s strategic assets (internal analysis) and to the wider environment (external analysis). It answers questions such as: how do we define the market, how big is it and how fast is it growing? Which market needs have to be met, and what makes the company distinctive? Identifying capabilities and data on sales, costs, market and competitors usually follows from a classic SWOT analysis.
- Objectives: from the analysis of the context, the marketer can define headline and secondary objectives (brand loyalty, brand awareness, profit and so on) and their KPIs, or key performance indicators.
- Strategy: the section defining the strategic lines the marketer intends to follow in reaching the marketing and financial objectives, the customer needs they intend to meet with their products and services, and their competitive positioning.
- Tactics, or the four Ps: the section detailing the operational work needed to implement the chosen strategies. Here the marketing mix comes in — the combination of controllable variables Kotler’s model groups into four categories (product, price, place and promotion). Decisions on communication and branding are another fundamental section of the plan.
- Implementation: this section defines the organisational consequences of approving the plan. For each activity it sets out responsibilities (who does what), the calendar and timing, and the relationships between the marketing function and the rest of the business.
- Control: the section defining the metrics that will measure and monitor performance, and with it whether the objectives are being reached.
- Appendices: generally documents of various kinds (indexes, charts, statistics and so on) that marketers bring in support of the choices and information given.
Image from bizible.com
Traditional marketing or digital marketing?
According to the tenth edition of Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, by 2022 the internet will have 1.4 billion new users on top of today’s 3.4 billion. More than 28 billion devices and connections will be online, and 82% of IP traffic will be video.
Technological and digital innovation is ever more embedded and shapes our daily lives. In that context, marketing strategies will increasingly favour online and digital channels at the expense of traditional ones.
Before choosing your marketing strategy, though, consider the following:
1. Define your target audience
Define the profile of your ideal customers, or buyer personas, in demographic terms (age, gender, occupation and so on) as well as by lifestyle. If you’re a B2B organisation, classify your audience instead by parameters such as type of business, size, location and so on. That information lets you build a marketing plan and an approach that fit your business’s needs.
2. The customer journey
Start from your customer base (or, in its absence, build a hypothetical purchase path in order to assess behaviour) and define the appropriate strategies in relation to buying preferences, the channels used most, and behaviour along the sales funnel.
The customer journey is the set of all the touchpoints between customers and a brand that mark the path followed during an online purchase. With the rapid spread of mobile, the original purchase decision process (advertising stimulus → choice at the shelf → experience at home) has changed.
Today, between the stimulus and the first moment of truth (the choice at the shelf), a zero moment of truth, or ZMOT, of research and information has appeared. People may see products in a store and buy them online, or the reverse. The experience at home ends up on the web as social posts or blog posts that influence other people’s buying decisions.
Image from www.thinkwithgoogle.com
Brands can therefore no longer afford to be absent, without clear marketing strategies, from the various platforms — platforms that encourage or ease the purchase, provide support and improve the relationship with existing and prospective customers.
Image from www.questionpro.de
3. Assessing effectiveness
Having chosen among the possibilities, check how effective the strategies you implemented actually are. The marketing process is in constant motion; where necessary, make the changes the strategies in use require.
Types of marketing strategy
Online and offline marketing strategies are numerous, and which you use depends on the strategic approach the marketer chooses — which by now falls broadly into two camps: traditional or outbound marketing, and inbound marketing.
What is outbound marketing?
It’s the traditional approach to marketing, so among its strategies we find:
- flyers and brochures;
- advertising on signage, billboards and traditional media;
- telemarketing;
- direct mail;
- event marketing;
- sales staff;
- one-to-one interactions.
Outbound marketing, or interruption marketing, is a “push” approach, characterised by a one-way message that interrupts the prospect’s day in order to push them towards a purchase.
What is inbound marketing?
It’s a relatively new, “pull” approach to marketing, in which the user is drawn in through quality content and other tactics and strategies towards the action the marketer wants.
Which marketing strategies work best in today’s market? There’s no single answer, though combining traditional and inbound approaches proves very effective. Both should be used in relation to where the consumer sits along the marketing funnel the marketer has built to guide the prospect’s buying decision.
What is a marketing funnel?
It’s a conceptual model in five stages (awareness, consideration, purchase, retention and advocacy) in which the marketer applies digital marketing strategies at each level of the funnel. Placing barriers and lead generation actions at the various steps lets the marketer end the process with a selection of prospects ready to make the “conversion” asked of them (filling in a form, subscribing to a newsletter, downloading content or buying).
Image from biasdigital.com
The main marketing strategies
HubSpot has identified more than 50 different types of marketing strategy; here are the most commonly used:
Digital marketing: a form of marketing using digital and traditional tools and channels for promotion, sales and customer retention.
Online marketing is a set of techniques, methods and tools using the web to promote products and services.
Search engine marketing (SEM), or search marketing, is a branch of web marketing covering everything aimed at generating visibility and qualified traffic on search engines.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the set of techniques aimed at ranking content organically on search engines in order to gain visibility and qualified traffic for a website.
Social media marketing, also known as social web marketing or social network marketing, is a form of marketing using social platforms to grow a brand’s recognition and visibility.
Content marketing is a form of marketing whose purpose is acquiring customers by creating and sharing quality editorial content of various kinds (news, infographics, guides, articles, photographs and so on).
Mobile marketing is “any marketing activity conducted through a ubiquitous network to which consumers are constantly connected using a personal mobile device” (Andreas Kaplan).
Cause marketing, or cause-related marketing, covers marketing and communication aimed at changing the attitudes and behaviour of individuals and the social groups connected to them — for instance giving an NGO part of the profit from a sale.
Growth marketing, or growth hacking, is an innovative, unconventional approach to marketing whose purpose is identifying the most effective strategies for growing a business rapidly (if that interests you, visit the Growth Hacking Academy).
Viral marketing is a form of web marketing built on creating content about a product or service so unique, original and engaging that people are glad to share it, generating a viral effect online.
Promotional marketing is a form of marketing using coupons, free samples and similar tactics to promote a business or raise brand awareness.
Article marketing is a form of marketing in which a company promotes its brand or products by publishing editorial articles. The content can be published on article marketing sites or on external blogs and specialist online magazines. Including links in that content helps build the link popularity of the sites whose search visibility is being managed (for more, read our article on link building).
Close range marketing is a form of marketing that sends promotional messages by Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to devices near the company’s location.
Affiliate marketing, or performance marketing, is a form of online marketing consisting of an arrangement between three parties: the advertiser, the publisher or affiliate, and the affiliate platform. The affiliate hosts the advertiser’s ad on their site and receives a fee for every “conversion” the consumer completes on the advertiser’s site. The payment model is usually cost per action (CPA) or cost per lead (CPL).
Community marketing is a strategy in which companies encourage the proactive involvement of members in their community in order to build long-term relationships.
Guerrilla marketing is a low-cost form of marketing using unconventional techniques and communication tools to spark curiosity and surprise people.
Freebie marketing is a form of marketing offering products or services at very low prices in order to build a solid customer base and help grow sales.
Cloud marketing is a form of marketing that puts a company’s marketing resources on an online platform, where customers can manage them.
Reverse marketing is a strategy that encourages consumers to seek out a brand or product themselves rather than waiting for brands to try to sell those products to them.
Word of mouth marketing, or referral, is the oldest and most important marketing instrument, consisting of the direct spread of information or recommendations between the people involved in the conversation.
Conclusion
In this lesson we’ve covered marketing strategies. As you’ll have seen, there are many of them, and defining and then implementing them isn’t always within everyone’s reach.
Our advice is to work with experienced growth hackers and marketers, though you could also try it yourself by acquiring the right skills.
Among the marketing strategies, growth hacking is the most effective way of getting the best results in the shortest time while making the most of the budget available. If the subject fascinates you, stay tuned to your favourite Growth Hacking Academy.
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