How To Develop A Marketing Strategy 2024: 3 Steps To Create A Complete Marketing Strategy

Now that you’re familiar with the key elements of a marketing strategy, you can see that all you need are the right insights to guide you further.

The steps we’ll outline below will unwrap how you can dig out all the necessary intel to build a strong marketing strategy for your business. 

• Choose your business and marketing goals

The very first thing you need to do to set up an efficient marketing strategy is to define your business and marketing goals. Because if you want brand awareness, you’ll need to employ a set of tactics that will largely differ from customer acquisition objectives.

Depending on your current market position and the competitive landscape, your goals might vary—they can have to do with:

• Customer base growth
• Sales volume growth
• Brand awareness, and so on

This part of the strategy is totally up to you. But you can still check out your competitive landscape to see the growth dynamics of other players and the overall market.

Now the question is how?

1. You can check out industry trends reports—the likes of Nielsen, Forrester, and other analytics firms publish quarterly or annual pieces that cover a lot of verticals.
2. But a more surefire way to check out your specific market trends would be to turn to market research tools that allow you to define your location and competitors. The Market Explorer tool would be an excellent choice.  

Say you have a food and beverage business in the U.S. and want to see how this industry is doing in your locale; you can simply choose your industry and explore some general trends within it—from market traffic that hints at potential market size and key players’ growth dynamics to their market share estimates and traffic generation patterns:

Image source: Market Explorer tool

These insights will help you understand if your competitors are expanding their market share, if the overall audience interest in your kinds of services are growing, and so on.

In turn, you can take this intel and use it to define your goals—e.g., if the overall market is shrinking, you cannot count on organic growth, so you should instead focus on growing your market share. 

2. Run more in-depth market research

Once you’ve set your overarching business and marketing goals, you can move on to the thorough market and competitive research.

Everything from the global economy to the emergence of new players can impact your business—large or small. So when you are conducting your research, you should consider the following:

• Competition, especially their value proposition and market stance
• Market size, so you can understand how many people you can realistically attract and serve
• Market and marketing gaps, to take a specific niche and come up with an efficient way to position and promote your products or services
• General economic/political/social patterns that might affect your business in the long run

All these factors take time to explore and unwrap, but they all impact your future success and the fulfillment of your goals—so you should allocate the time to research these aspects.

If competition and market size are something you should have unwrapped in step one, the rest is subject to additional research.

Identifying economic, social, political, and cultural patterns

PEST (political, economic, sociocultural, technological) analysis will help you understand the global landscape that influences your market realities—from legislation changes to tech developments.  

Take a look at the image below and make sure you can address each point:

You can fill in a worksheet from MindTools or, first, read up on PEST analysis in this post.

Now, to pinpoint market and marketing gaps, you’ll have to move away from general info and knowledge and turn to specific insights that will help identify them.

Pinpointing market and marketing gaps

Perceptual mapping will help to assess consumers’ attitudes to various brands and their positioning—all to spot existing market gaps.

It’s fairly straightforward; you have to create two axes that juxtapose two functions or perceptual features of a product or service (e.g., cheap-expensive vs. high-quality/low-quality) and ask customers to place you and your competitors within the map.

Image source: Group Map

This visual depiction will instantly show where you can fill in a certain niche where there are fewer competitors or no rivals at all.

Now, when it comes to identifying marketing gaps or unwrapping how other market players position their products, you’ll have to do some digging:

• Find your rivals’ most promoted products/services and offerings 

Image source: Traffic Analytics tool

Semrush’s Traffic Analytics tool reveals the most visited pages of any site. In this case, we can see the stats hint at the fact that Taco Bell (if it was your competitor) attracts a significant share of its traffic to the rewards or special deals pages. Not very many other players do, so you might want to introduce a more attractive rewards plan to your customers.

• Check out competitors’ traffic acquisition strategies and platforms they mainly target and discover if you are seeing similar acquisition patterns

You can use Market Explorer’s benchmarking report to reveal these stats.

Image source: Market Explorer tool

• If you see that your competitors have a significant share of visitors coming from organic search, you can use Keyword Gap and Backlink Gap tools to reveal missed opportunities within your keyword and backlink strategies 

These insights not only help reveal keywords and sites that link back to your rivals, they also can inform your marketing strategy—from keywords you are missing out on (often reflecting product or content gaps) to potential partnerships you haven’t thought of (if few of your rivals have backlinks from an industry news site, you might want to be there as well).

Image source: Backlink Gap tool

3. Build up your ideal customer profile or buyer persona

We’ve already covered some ground regarding buyer personas and content, but having a clear definition of your customer profile doesn’t just help with your marketing tactics, it actually defines your marketing strategy. 

After all, you are marketing to a specific audience, so you have to know what these people look like—their needs, wants, preferred platforms, expectations, and so on.

Using the 4P framework (product, price, place, promotion), you can address the key features of your target audience:

• What is your target demographic? A marketing strategy for Gen Z will be drastically different from how you market to Baby Boomers, so you need to have the basic demographic data covered.
• Is your unique value proposition matching your audience’s needs and wants? Also, is your audience increasingly “something”-conscious, and are you tailoring to their expectations from your brand? (Product)
• Is your buyer persona’s financial situation a good fit for your product’s or service’s price? (Price)
• Where does your target audience like to hang out, shop, discover products, and so on? (Place)
• How does your audience like to communicate with brands? Emails, in-person interactions, apps, influencers, etc. (Promotion)

You have to gather intel to address all these questions—and the answers will help to come up with a marketing strategy that meets your audience exactly how and where it wants to meet you.

You could spend months conducting in-depth customer interviews or turn to analytics firms that will do the job for you. But that’s resource-intensive, and few brands can afford to spend time and money running this kind of audience research.

Instead, you can use various tools that will shed some light on the questions you have to address.

Audience Intelligence tool is one of the most comprehensive solutions to collect in-depth qualitative audience insights—from basic demographic info and platforms they love to influencers they trust and their interests and affinities:

Image source: Audience Intelligence tool

If you don’t want to get another tool for audience research specifically, you can stay with your Market Explorer and Traffic Analytics tools—they will return both basic audience intel and some advanced insights like their most visited sites and social media networks, traffic journey, and so on.

 

Image source: Market Explorer tool