Everything You Need to Know About a Strong Marketing Strategy Formulation 📢
We are now in the third year of a pandemic that is in effect changing industries and business models globally. Some of these changes have been a dramatic turnaround from standard BAU thinking and activities. For example, a large proportion of retailers in Australia have both invested and converted a considerable majority of their businesses to online platforms. Some companies have turned to software and algorithms for marketing strategy formulation, including evaluating the potential of their new product. While others are going on the journey to understand their customers’ new digital behaviours as customer preferences and expectations of value vary considerably when they shop online.
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When it comes to marketing strategy formulation, you should ask yourself, “Do I have the right mindset, skills, and strategy to add more value to our company?”
Key to understanding value both online and in conventional business models are marketing departments. Marketers influence sales, outcomes, and growth. But as a result of the transformation, they now have a new and very important role in businesses: i.e., Understanding customer value. Or making sense of the differences in customer needs, behaviours and values using data, research and analytics to reset business priorities and actively drive growth and value creation in a digital age.
In this respect, the main challenge for chief commercial and marketing officers is to figure out how to drive change and create value as quickly as possible.
At Taylor Wells, we believe that this is the year for marketing executives to recommit to advancing transformation. In this article, we will discuss five initiatives for marketers to initiate growth and achieve value in the best way possible.
We argue that to have a strong marketing strategy formulation, teams must embrace the shift to growth agenda as they recognise that their function can drive revenue. Then we talk about how this transition will succeed through digital transformation. By the end, you will discover unconventional but creative ways to drive value for your company this year.
What Does a Strong Marketing Strategy Formulation Actually Mean?
What is marketing strategy formulation?
Marketing strategy formulation refers to the process of establishing a company’s marketing targets and objectives. This enables executives to produce a guideline or blueprint and then construct techniques to realise the strategies. Marketing strategy models look into the market and then determine which marketing practices will be most efficient in attracting clients and persuading people to seek out the business’s offerings.
What’s the importance of marketing strategy in business?
1. Marketing strategy streamlines your daily routines without sacrificing results.
Once your brand, messaging, and targets are well established, following your marketing strategy facilitates your everyday execution of marketing activities. For example, using your marketing strategy, you can quickly schedule meetings and define agendas based on your progress and current tasks to accomplish.
With a defined marketing strategy, your team understands that all marketing and sales resources have a purpose. They know what to utilise them for, and that the sales and advertising style is intentional.
2. Marketing strategy allows for future business growth.
Integrating your marketing approach with your general company growth strategy guarantees that all of your marketing initiatives and budgets contribute to the expansion of your firm. For example, your marketing strategy will direct your team on where to devote the most efforts, what platforms to engage in, and who to target with your messaging to maximize returns.
3. Marketing strategy keeps your team focused and free of distractions.
A well-thought-out and well-informed marketing strategy help to filter out the clutter of less successful tools, techniques, and personas, allowing you to remain competitive in your industry. Following your marketing strategy’s standards helps your marketing team keep focused on your brand’s purpose, ambition, beliefs, and desired outcomes.
4. Marketing strategy helps increase quality marketing leads.
You can maximise your marketing efforts by generating more leads. To accomplish this, conduct a complete investigation of your market and present customers. At the proper time or in the right context, your messaging or content can have a stronger impact on the right personalities. We advise you to make it easier for your customers to go forwards or make a purchase.
What are the 5 marketing strategies?
1. Influencer marketing strategy
Partnerships with influencers enhance your brand’s visibility and credibility. Followers believe in the suggestions of people they admire and associate with.
However, be cautious while choosing influencers. You’ll want to make sure their society, values, and style are compatible with yours. You should also set your achievable partnerships. If you’re a small business, don’t chase after celebrities with millions of followers because you’re unlikely to get a deal with them. To start, target micro-influencers with thousands of followers.
2. Affiliation marketing strategy
Public relations are a brand’s best friend. Consider media mentions. Basically, positive publicity is free advertising. Hence, the more you can get out there, the more your brand recognition rises. If you are a cosmetics company, for example, and you have received some media references in publications, you can build up links with partners to further promote a better reputation.
3. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and content marketing strategy
The ultimate goal is to raise brand awareness, which leads to increased website traffic and revenue. Make friends with the algorithm. Since many search engines, such as Google, prefer genuine search results, enhancing SEO will help you expand your brand’s reach significantly.
Concentrate on specific keywords and be certain to include them in your content. Update content regularly so that your site is marked as active. You can accomplish this, for instance, through regular online blog posts.
4. Social media marketing strategy
Having a web following on relevant social networks will develop an active community and devoted customers, allowing a stage for promoting discounts, specials, and product updates.
Keep in mind that your postings should be a good mix of interesting and personalised to attract particular segments. Work on aesthetic appeal and relevant hashtags on Instagram, for instance, while putting more effort into short but entertaining videos on TikTok.
5. Email marketing strategy
Since it gives regular encounters in a customer’s inbox, email marketing is not only highly efficient but also comparatively easier to execute. It is a non-offensive but consistent method of nurturing and generating leads and promotions.
We suggest building customer contact lists based on characteristics or prompted actions so that you may send customised but targeted messages to your customers.
How can you have a strong marketing strategy formulation?
As we mentioned, chief commercial and marketing officers should ramp up transformation and value creation. How can they do this? Following the data-driven transformation of marketing, e-commerce, and consumer experience, here’s a step-by-step guide on how marketers can make an impact:
1. Don’t get stuck in the old ways. Make the shift.
It wasn’t exciting when marketing was the centre of spending, mainly when the Chief Financial Officer wanted to reduce costs. However, marketing is now recognised as a revenue generator that is intimately connected to sales.
Today’s media types, such as social, search, and algorithmic, are all measurable. This made leaders across the executive team anticipate outcomes from marketing expenses.
Of course, over-indexing on performance-only expenses, such as last-click online sales is a disadvantage to brand capability and equity. If you want a winning strategy, you must create a balance between short-term and long-term outcomes. But we must also note that performance-based spending has productive impacts. For instance, executives outside the marketing department can now notice the impact of marketing at work.
This provides marketers with an opportunity to perform equally with the organisation’s traditional revenue leaders in sales. Marketers should seize this change.
The best approach for marketers is to make results more understandable to a wider range of audiences across the organisation.
Let’s take attribution as an example. Attribution tells us which marketing tactics resulted in which outcomes (i.e., a conversion). It assists in understanding which sequence of events influences people to engage in the desired behaviour. However, in terms of e-commerce and social media, mobile platforms, browsers, and walled gardens proceed to alter the rules and the landscape.
In this regard, marketers should not be reluctant to consider the entire budget to produce outcomes. It is better when organisations view expenditures as performance drivers. To succeed, there is a need to concentrate less on specific lines of expenses and more on the inferential and combined value of them all. This requires a paradigm shift towards growth.
2. A strong marketing formulation requires you to have a growth mindset.
Today, businesses’ growth agenda should no longer adhere to traditional organisational limits.
This implies that marketers are also responsible for driving the growth agenda and providing coherent business leadership.
Of course, this is not about controlling the data, analytics, tech agenda, teams, or budget. Customers are unconcerned about internal organisational boundaries.
Business leadership backed by a growth mindset is all about defining the proper internal engagements in the context of the customer experience. Customers rather want intuitive, predictable, and relevant experiences. How can you achieve this? Let’s look at social commerce as an illustration of the growth agenda.
The rapid growth of social commerce is an excellent example of a growth strategy.
In the context of social commerce, we can observe that the media presented to consumers is incredibly precise and connects to an efficient, personalised e-commerce experience. To do this, you have to consider conditions such as users who are usually on a mobile device. Hence, they require a quick, frictionless, mobile-first payment feature.
This gives us the idea that any difficulty in customer experience, like a hard time checking out, can hinder marketing from turning into a sale. That’s why removing friction from customer experience is always urgent. Everything must happen freely and this requires further teamwork than most organisational boundaries permit.
To drive growth, we advise marketers to cooperate with online product pages and payment mechanism designers to establish a seamless experience.
Even a recent EY/Financial Times survey reports that the majority of about 200 senior marketing executives believe the marketing function should have a stronger presence in corporate strategy. And once the desired collaboration is set, the next step is to take a closer look at your data.
3. Pay close attention to data during marketing strategy formulation.
The pandemic brought C-suite leaders together and many industries saw an obvious advance in digital transformation, relying on data processing. Some businesses implemented technology such as CRM. Others consolidated sources into a single data lake. But we cannot overlook important areas such as the accurate level of data quality as well as overseeing the health of data throughout the organisation.
Taking the above argument into consideration, marketers must pay close attention to the sources of high-quality data. Examples such as holistic analytics models create value over one-off remedies designed for a specific time or corporate use case.
The key to obtaining optimal sources of data is a meaningful collaboration across functional company leaders. In the same EY/Financial Times survey, 600 cross-functional senior executives asserted that data strategy is more dispersed now than before in executive positions encompassing CEO, CFO, COO, CTO, CISO, and CMO. This paves the way for the best sales and marketing, technology, data/analytics, and finance.
Scale is the purpose of collaborations and you cannot attain that by simply having a better “dashboard” or data visualisation. Scalability demands the alignment of data, technology, and business transformations. If done correctly, value creation is achieved. Nevertheless, we understand that it can be hard to incorporate data into digital technology and processes. For sure, you will face challenges along the way. Our tip: Focus on your talents.
4. Prioritise talent conflicts and don’t hesitate to be unconventional.
With data and technology concerns, issues on talents are likely to be the most difficult challenge this year. There is an agreement among CMOs across sectors, such as consumer goods, technology, and manufacturing on talent challenges. Data-driven skill scarcity, overall retention issues, and incentive alignment are among the concerns. What causes these conflicts?
Let’s make a quick discussion on one of the most common roots of conflict with talents, which is miscommunication. A marketing lead, for example, may assure the team that they can handle their duty on their own when the truth is that they don’t trust those around them to execute what has to be done properly. Time and time again, a failure to communicate an idea or information happens in workplaces. This often leads to misunderstanding. How can you avoid this?
Workplace relationships are a two-way street. Make your statements clear that there will be no place for guessing or misconceptions. Notice your facial expression, body language, and vocal tone. These serve as non-verbal cues. Lastly, be receptive to the ideas of your coworkers and strive to learn from them. Getting data-driven does not mean we no longer need proper communication between humans.
To solve conflicts like what was discussed above, today’s marketers must have in-depth expertise that is both diverse and detailed. The same goes for marketing strategy formulation.
Marketers with diverse knowledge and skills push leaders to reconsider the structure of teams, from training to managing up to collaborating with external partners such as agencies. Businesses need new labour models while maintaining the appropriate balance of uniformity and liberty.
Numerous leaders are already on board with the transition to better labour models. Some are developing new curricula to reshape their existing talent into proper modern marketers. This increases consistency and even mobility within their organisations.
In line with this, marketing executives should also consider establishing pricing teams within their organisations. Our findings show that with the right set-up and pricing team in place, incremental earnings gains can begin to occur in less than 12 weeks.
After 6 months, the team can capture at least 1.0-2.25% more margin using better price management processes. In 9-12 months, businesses are very often generating between 3-7% additional margin each year as they identify more complex and previously unrealised opportunities, efficiencies, and risks.
From steps 1 to 4, we talked about value creation in the context of digital data processing. In all these prospects of advancing digital transformation and getting more data-driven, we want to remind you of one thing. Make room for resourcefulness and curiosity for your hard work to pay off.
5. For a strong and successful marketing strategy formulation, be creative.
Indeed, data revolution brought far more forward-thinking among industries. Traditional marketers look in the past to examine previous results. Modern marketers, on another hand, utilise predictive analytics to make forecasts. These innovations enable marketers to promote growth and efficiency in powerful ways. For example, these analytics can be used in both targeted advertising and ensuring the delivery of products.
But then again, if marketers become overly data-driven and if they lean too far in automation, they are likely to lose their greatest assets, creativity and intuition. This shouldn’t be the case.
While new technologies quickly target customers, the true purpose of marketing strategy formulation is to ensure that creative messaging connects with humans.
There are several techniques to be creative in marketing. You might want to consider optimising and updating your online platforms through personalised content, as well as engaging your customers by launching campaigns with giveaways.
Fashion label, Marc Jacobs launched a campaign based on user-generated content. Fans of the brand can join by posting photos and videos of themselves wearing the brand’s clothing for a chance to become an official brand ambassador. It was an excellent way to increase brand awareness while also observing customer behaviour.
From retail media networks in the digital and physical worlds to virtual branding and transactions in the metaverse, new marketing options and modes will continue to emerge. Marketers should learn in the process. Our advise: Experiment and be unique.
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Bottomline
2022 will mark the exciting opportunity for marketing leaders to enhance their organisation’s marketing strategy formulation. Thus, they have to connect the customer journey to the full-growth agenda while retaining their creativity, as well as scaling data and technology in more meaningful ways than ever before.
Therefore, they will have to make more optimal decisions as the number of variables, connections, and complexity continue to rise. Once marketing executives manage to build connectivity and take centre stage in growth strategy, they also transform their companies and unlock new levels of value creation.
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