Your marketing strategy will set you up for the rest of the upcoming year. So, being thorough, specific, and confident in your decisions will be the key to its success. If you’re starting to think about what your 2025 marketing strategy is going to look like, then you’re in the right place! The following are some things to consider when setting your yearly marketing strategy.
What is a marketing strategy?
Before we get too into the details, let’s first define what a marketing strategy is.
A marketing strategy and a marketing plan aren’t the same thing. Your plan is the day-to-day guide on how you and your team will implement your strategy. While it’s still important, the strategizing piece needs to come first. Your marketing strategy is “The big-picture vision for how you’ll achieve your business’s goals. It sets the stage for how you’ll position your brand, who you’ll target, and the brand values you’ll uphold.” It will include things like performance market analyses, objective and goal setting, key benchmarks, and high-level initiatives.
It’s all the work you need to do behind the scenes so that the tools and campaigns you implement throughout the year are grounded in reason, targeted, and successful.
Your marketing budget
Your marketing budget will account for roughly 5-10% of your annual revenue. According to Semrush, you’re budget will go towards marketing costs such as:
- Web development
- SEO
- Ads
- Software
- Salaries
- Freelance help
- Event venue rental
- Marketing agency fees
Once you’ve determined your marketing strategy, you can figure out how much of your budget will be allocated to each expense. Additionally, organizing your marketing tactics by priority will help you make decisions confidently on what gets larger chunks of the budget and what (unfortunately) just doesn’t make the cut.
To learn more about setting a budget for your marketing strategy and plan, read this article.
Your business goals
When setting your marketing objective and strategy for the coming year, keep your business goals in mind. Business goals are the long-term targets you want your business to hit. They’re very high level and impact every aspect of your organization. Marketing strategy, as stated above, is how you will achieve your business goals.
Once you’ve determined your business goals for the year, you can set a supporting marketing objective—or the marketing goal you seek to meet by the end of the year.
Your marketing objective
Your marketing objective is the high-level target that all your marketing efforts will be pointed at throughout the year. Every initiative, benchmark, and goal that you set should all help you meet that one big overarching goal, which, in turn, will help you meet your business goal(s).
Some marketing objectives that you might pair with your business goal include:
- Increase Frequency of Purchase
- Increase Average Deal Size
- Increase Number of Customers
Guiding initiatives
Your marketing initiatives will still be higher level than the day-to-day tactics that will define your marketing plan, but they’ll be much more specific than your marketing objective. These are more like mid-level goals that you will use to determine which tactics will be most helpful in implementing your marketing strategy and achieving your yearly goals and objectives. These are an important element to consider when setting your strategy as they are what guide all of the little pieces that are easy to lose focus on.
Simply put, if your objective is the picture on the box, then the initiatives are the sides of the puzzle that hold all of the little pieces together.
Supporting tactics
Your marketing tactics are those daily efforts that will implement your marketing strategy—the inner puzzle pieces. Choosing the wrong ones, gearing them toward the wrong audiences, or using them on the wrong platforms will cause your entire marketing strategy to miss. While these are the lowest-level pieces of your entire strategy, they are what actually make the goals, benchmarks, and initiatives happen successfully. Without being mindful of these, you will end up with the wrong tactics for the goals that you want to reach and, therefore, fail to meet your objectives.
Your past marketing efforts
One final piece that you should consider when creating a marketing strategy is an audit of your past marketing strategies. This is where data collection really comes in handy. To see how well tactics, campaigns, and other marketing efforts did, you need to track their successes and failures. Even if it’s simple notes, “This is what we did, and this is how it turned out,” can show you whether it was successful. It might not be able to tell you why, but it can help you tweak it in future efforts or try something else entirely.
Metrics to keep an eye on are:
- Website traffic and click-thru rates
- Website performance
- Ad performance
- Social media performance
- Email campaign performance
- Sales
Anything you can track throughout a campaign should be tracked so you can do a proper audit and make the right decisions for the upcoming year.
Working with The Cultural North
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