How to Create a Marketing Strategy

Marketing strategy: the holy grail of all things marketing. It’s the backbone of your business and the framework to growing your business. It aligns your team, ensures you’re spending energy in the right areas, and is a main driver of success. So – how to create a marketing strategy that will propel you to growth and success?

Take a deep breath. We’ll dive into it together.

Before starting, know that this process can be time consuming and complex.

If you’d like to take away the stress, challenge, and time commitment, consider bringing in professionals to support you.

At Marketing Growth Lab, we’ve developed a proprietary strategic marketing framework to take the stress away from marketing strategy development.

We come in, review your results, dive into the numbers, see what’s missing, and develop a comprehensive strategy, equal parts best practices and customized to your business.

If you’d rather go through it on your own, however, here is a clear framework you can use. It does take time to go develop, so be sure to allocate the right time to dive in and do this right.

M³: The Marketing Mastery Method

The first step to create a marketing strategy is breaking it into pieces.

We developed M³: The Marketing Mastery Method to do just that. It breaks the marketing strategy into 12 clear steps, across four main sections.

1. A Customer Deep Dive
   • Buyer Personas
   • Customer Journey Maps
   • Brand Identity & Positioning
2. The Strategic Analysis
   • Health Check
   • Customer Funnel
   • PESO evaluation (Paid/Earned/Shared/Owned)
3. The Marketing Strategy
   • Marketing Strategy
   • Marketing Objectives
   • Marketing Tactics
4. Measurement, Iteration, and Experimentation
   • Set Goals
   • Measure
   • Experiment & Iterate

Let’s dive into each of these sections.

Section 1: Customer Deep Dive

1. Customer / Buyer Personas

How to create a marketing strategy step one: Create Buyer Personas. Essentially, they’re a snapshot of who your ideal customer is, which help you understand what’s important to them and how to talk to them.

It usually starts with research. This can come from:

• Data on your current customers
• Stats via analytics platforms, like Google Analytics, or HubSpot
• Interviews with those in your organization who talk to customers regularly
• Interviews with customers themselves
• Customer surveys (via email or your website)
• Polls on social media

The next step is looking for patterns and trends. You can typically bundle personas by a few different ways:

1. Geographically – based on their location
2. Psychographically – around their needs/desires
3. Behaviourally – based on their actual behaviors
4. Demographically – based on their stats, like income, gender, marital status, etc.

Then, you actually build the buyer persona template. It’s a visual snapshot of around 3 different buyers, each of which you can create a plan for how to talk with.

Compiling target customers can take a little time – but really understanding your customers inside and out is essential to almost every element of your business. 

Every piece of content you create, every image you curate, every blog post you write, every interview you give, should be talking to your exact buyer.

2. Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Maps are essentially a visual display of the path a customer will go on from not knowing you at all, to being a paying customer, who is referring other paying customers.

The value in customer journey maps lies in the ability to see that path, clearly, and understand ways to optimize their journey.

For example, you can see things like:

• How are they finding you?
• What brand touch points are they interacting with along their consideration to purchase?
• What type of interactions are the one leading them to purchase?
• What do they do after they’re a paying customer?
• How do customers become power users or referrers?
• Where might potential customers be falling away, and what can you do to keep them interested?

These are super valuable to your business, both in improving conversion rate from prospect to paying customer, and in finding ways to increase your revenue.

3. Brand Identity & Positioning

A few things come into play here.

First is, understanding your current brand identity. This includes things like your brand’s:

• Voice & tone
• Brand equity & promises
• Brand look & feel
• Logo
• Brand colors
• Brand guidelines
• Brand presence audit across platforms
• Etc.

Having a cohesive brand identity across all markets and platforms is essential to growing your business.

Second, is understanding your brand positioning.

These are things like how you compare against your competition, which market segment you’re going after, how competitive it is, and how you line up against the competition.

Having a very clear view of how you differ from the competition is essential.

For example, are you the more expensive option, with all the bells and whistles, customized option? Or are you the lower cost option, focusing on simplicity and ease of use?

You’re going to have a different focus, brand voice, and targeting strategy accordingly, so figuring this out is important.

Finally, you’ll also want to think about overall macro economic conditions affecting your business and your industry. Geo-political events, interest rates, inflation, supply chain issues, stock market swings, elections – these can all affect your business on a fundamental level, regardless of your actions.

Section 2: The Analysis

Okay – you’ve completed the customer deep dive, and you have a pretty clear view of how you stand in the market. The next phase of how to create a marketing strategy is the analytics deep dive. Here’s you’re going to be looking into what you’ve done and how it has performed.

4. Health Check

Oh, the health check. This is a time consuming one – but a super powerful piece of developing your marketing strategy.

Here, you’re going to want to dive into pretty much every analytic tool you have. Here is a brief list of examples – but it’s far from exhaustive.

• Google Analytics
• HubSpot Analytics
• Website CMS Analytics
• Facebook Analytics
• Twitter Analytics
• Instagram Analytics
• Pinterest Analytics
• LinkedIn Analytics
• TikTok Analytics
• Other Social Media Analytics
• Google Ads Analytics
• Bing Ads Analytics
• Programmatic Display Ad Analytics
• Email Tool Analytics
• PR Analytics
• Event & Experiential Marketing Results
• Etc.

Again, this is just a snapshot. Some companies have dozens of analytics tools.

It will take some time, but you will find super powerful insights by going through these. Look at the last 6-12 months worth of data and look for trends.

Based on the data you have available, see how you perform on different:

• Browsers
• Versions of browsers
• Devices
• By different locations
• By different demographics
• Across different customer spending segments (e.g., highest spenders vs. average customers)
• Seasons
• Tools
• Website pages
• Sources of visitors (e.g., did they come to your website via an organic Google search, a paid ad, from social media, an email, a specific campaign, a referral, etc.)
• Etc.

You’re looking for gaps, holes, and quick wins.

For example, how is your mobile traffic acting and converting, as compare to desktop? Do certain locations, customers, or segments perform better than others? Are there any obvious gaps in your conversions that you could immediately improve?

You’re sure to get some incredible insights from this analysis that will prove that the time investment here is more than worth the outcomes.

5. Customer Funnel

Remember back in customer journey mapping, when we looked at the actions and feelings customers take going from unaware, through consideration, to purchase, and referral?

The Customer Funnel builds on that, taking it a step further.

In it, we take customers through the various stages of a customer funnel, from:

• Unaware
• Aware but not considering
• Consideration
• Purchase
• Power User
• Retention (paying year after year)
• Referrer

This is a simplistic view, and you’ll want to customize it to your organization, and plot actual metrics against it. Here’s an example:

• Unaware
• Brand impressions (views across all platforms, including website, social media, paid ads, PR, trade shows, etc.)
• Website visits (people who saw you and came to your website to learn more)
• Leads
• Marketing Qualified Leads
• Sales Qualified Leads
• Opportunity
• Customer
• High-Revenue Customer
• Customer for More than 1 Year
• Referring Customer

One of the most important pieces here is to determine which are the most valuable stages to hit.

From there, you’ll be able to tailor Section 3: The Marketing Strategy accordingly.

For example, if creating customers and keeping them for more than 1 year are the two most important things, your marketing tactics and approach are going to be very different than if creating more awareness and a higher percentage of referring customers are your priorities.

6. P-E-S-O Analysis (Paid / Earned / Shared / Owned)

In the PESO analysis, you’re going to take a look at all the different marketing tactics you’ve done in the last year, compared to the menu of available marketing tactics.

The easiest way to do this is to break it out across four main areas:

1. Paid Media – all paid media, including search ads, display ads, programmatic ads, social media ads, paid partnerships, trade shows, etc.
2. Earned Media – this is all of your PR activities and things that get you earned media exposure. I know the PR landscape has become more pay-to-play here, so there is likely overlap across paid media.
3. Shared Media – this includes all of your social media channels, and platforms where you don’t have full creative control, or are dependent on an algorithm, which would include things like app stores.
4. Owned Media – includes everything you have full creative control over. Think your website, newsletter, blog, app, etc.

The PESO model is a pretty clear way to organize your marketing tactics across platforms.

Understand that there will be some bleed over the Venn diagrams – a paid PR placement being a great example, or a paid social media ad. Do your best to bulk them into the area that makes the most sense for you.

This will be a great way to see, in a visual snapshot, all the activities you have been doing, and will help you see gaps of other activities you may not have considered in the past.

Here are a few examples of media activities across paid, earned, shared, and owned, via SpinSucks.

Section 3: The Marketing Strategy

Strategy Time! While this section is called the marketing strategy, remember that it really is only one of the four sections of how to create a marketing strategy. Doing this without doing the previous six steps is really not a strategy in itself.

At best, it’s a guess of what you think might work, based on gut instinct. And while I’m a big fan of gut instincts, I’m a bigger fan of data-backed recommendations.

7. Marketing Strategy

The first step is the overarching strategy.

This is usually a one-slide view, summing up your strategy in a nutshell, and it the bridge between the organizational strategy and your marketing tactics.

Start with the organizational strategy. What does the company as a whole want to accomplish? Your marketing strategy is a lever (a big lever) towards helping make that happen.

I typically like pulling it together in a two-paragraph summary, lined up as such:

Help <company name> accomplish <key company objectives, e.g., growth & profitability> by directing efforts to the most valuable marketing tactics, ultimately increasing <key metrics, e.g., awareness / leads / sales / market share / referrals> with target audiences.​

To achieve this, we will provide marketing communications to the right audiences in the right voice, across the right channel, at the right time. Communication should cater more so to <new or existing> users, with a goal to increase our <key metrics, e.g., sales / retention / awareness / monthly users>.

8. Marketing Objectives

Your marketing objectives essentially take your overall marketing strategy, and break it down into five clear steps.

Often, but not always, you’ll find it aligns quite well to your customer funnel (see – it all works together!).

Here’s an example template. You likely won’t use this word-for-word – but I like having something to start with.

9. Marketing Tactics

Next up, you’ll want to plot out your marketing tactics.

In doing so, the most effective way I’ve found has been in a grid format, where you have:

• On the top axis, either:
  • The P-E-S-O sections, or
  • Your target personas
• And on the side axis, have:
  • Increase / Maintain / Decrease
  • Plus a section to consider down the road, or ideas for the next fiscal year

Here’s an example of how that could look:

While you’re going to be engaging your marketing team throughout this process, this is one step where you’re really want their input. I like to schedule a 4hr (minimum) workshop just for this step alone.

I like to start with each team member inputting:

• The tactics they’re currently doing
• What % of their time that tactic is taking
• How much $ we’re spending on that tactic
• What the key results are

Having that ready before the workshop begins means you’re not starting from square one, and it’s easier to start knowing what to prioritize, and think through what might be missing.

Section 4: Measurement & Experimentation

Many people think after you’ve completed the customer deep dive, the full analysis, and the marketing strategy, you’re done.

Sorry to burst your bubble – but definitely not!

The last stage of how to create a marketing strategy is SO important. Here, you’ll set your goals, dive into your reporting, and incorporate experimentation – the core pillar of growth marketing.

10. Set Goals

Marketers today have never had access to more data. They’ve also never before been held to higher standards in delivering on results.

As a strategic marketer, you’re going to want to pick the metrics that matter most to your business, and deliver on them.

If you’ve gotten to this point on your journey of how to create a marketing strategy, you probably have a pretty clear vision of what metrics are most important to your organization.

If not, go back to the customer funnel section, and look at which metrics are most aligned with your organization. Below are a just few of the most valuable metrics you might want to consider as you’re building out your measures of success – though there are far more.

Sample Marketing Metrics

• Brand Impressions​ – how many people saw your brand
• Brand Awareness – usually measured via awareness studies​
• Marketing Leads – how many contacts you were able to collect, usually measured by channel
• MQLs​ – Marketing Qualified Leads, how many of the leads you collected actually align to your target personas
• SQLs – Sales Qualified Leads, more of a B2B metric, this measures how many of the leads the sales team have identified as viable
• CPC – cost per click, a core paid metric
• CPL – cost per lead, taking paid customers deeper down the funnel
• CPA or CAC – Cost per Acquisition, or Customer Acquisition Cost, essentially the cost of acquiring the customer, which includes every single sales & marketing cost
• Email stats – deliverability, open rates, clicks, click throughs, unsubscribes, bounces, etc.)
• MNUs – monthly new users
• MAUs – monthly active users
• Conversion rate​ – converting each customer farther down the funnel, e.g., impression to lead, lead to MQL, SQL to new customer, new customer to 1yr retained customer, etc.
• Retention / churn rate​ – what % of users are still with you after a given time period, typically one year
• Referral rate​ – what % of your customers refer you to new potential customers
• Total Sales​ – saves revenue
• Average revenue per client​
• CLV – customer lifetime value
• CLV:CAC – customer lifetime value compared to customer acquisition cost. You’ll want specific ratios for this. I like to aim for 4:1, but each organization is different.
• ROI – return on investment

Remember, these should align with both your Marketing Strategy, from step 7, as well as your overall company objectives.

Always think about which pieces are most valuable to your company – because when you hit them, you’ll prove yourself as incredibly valuable to them.

11. Measure

How are goals and measurement different?

One key way: goal are set once, while measurements are reviewed regularly.

You’re going to want to measure your results at a minimum once per month. But any growth marketer worth their salary is going to be measuring far more frequently.

I personally look at our top line stats every day, even sometimes on the weekend.

It’s become a bit of a game to me. How many leads have we gotten in the last 24hrs? How close are we to reaching our monthly targets?

It allows me and my team to make adjustments and pull our growth levers if we’re behind for the month, or go into high-level brainstorming if we’re ahead for the month.

Have a tracking and reporting process set up to ensure you stay on top of your numbers, and you’ll be glad you did.

12. Experiment & Iterate

Experimentation is the backbone of growth marketing.

Remember back to grade 8, where you learned the scientific method? It’s coming back into play – but this time in marketing.

The scientific method goes like this:

• Ask a Question
• Do Background Research
• Construct a Hypothesis
• Test with an Experiment
• Analyze Data
• Communicate

So, your last step on how to create a marketing strategy is to experiment & iterate.

You’ll want to track all of this via a Growth Marketing Experimentation Tracker.

You’ll likely be running a lot of experiments after implementing your marketing strategy, and an Experimentation Tracker is the place you’ll track them all.

In your Experimentation Tracker, you’ll include things like:

• What the experimentation is
• The variables it’s comparing
• KPIs you’re measuring
• What success will look like
• A link to the experimentation in question
• Who is running it
• What the timeline is
• The outcome of the experiment
• Where it has been implemented

Using this to keep track of everything will not only save you brainpower from remembering it all – it will also allow you to look back and show how much experimentation you’ve done over a month, a quarter, a year. You can bet your leadership team will be excited about that!

Creating a Marketing Strategy to Grow Your Business

By now, you’ve hopefully learned how to create a marketing strategy that will grow your business exponentially and make you look like a star.

Remember, your marketing strategy should be flexible and adaptable. It’s not carved in stone – it’s a living, breathing strategy that can, and should, adapt as things change.

Monitor your results regularly and adjust your strategy to ensure you’re meeting goals and impacting your audience.

Because never forget that that’s what it ultimately comes down to: your audience.

Everything you do, both within this marketing strategy and outside of it, should ultimately come back to your audience and making their lives better.

It’s why your business exists.

Last piece of advice – have fun with it! I personally believe marketing strategies can be super fun, though to be fair, I am a bit of a marketing dork.

Contact me any time if you have questions or if you’d like to chat through the “done for you” option. I promise I read every single email.

Because you’re MY audience – and making your life better is ultimately why we exist!

So, hit us up any time at [email protected].

& Follow Along @MarketingGrowthLab

On Instagram, Pinterest, or LinkedIn.