The 5 Critical Components of a Leading Marketing Strategy

A marketing strategy is one of the first steps when planning a successful campaign. Overall, the marketing strategy gives your business the opportunity of reaching consumers and turning them into clients of your own product/service. However when planning a marketing strategy, there are multiple components that must be considered. The internal and external components of your business and the market must be explored in order to identify the most successful outcome. Similarly, identifying what makes your business stand out against others, is crucial in establishing a leading strategy. Here are the 5 most critical components when planning your leading marketing strategy.

Target Audience:

Your target audience is one of the most crucial components of your strategy. As the group of people who are most likely to identify the most with your product/service, knowing who these people are, where they come from, how they behave and think, will be a determining factor on how successful your marketing campaign could be. Although there are brands that tend to focus on the mass audiences, appealing to the most and largest group as possible, by refining your audience and focusing predominantly on a specific range of people, enables the engagement of your brand to dramatically increase. In order to find this ideal audience, going through the process of market segmentation is crucial.

Here are the four main components of market segmentation:

1. Demographic: Age, Gender, Income, Education, etc.
2. Geographic: Country, City, Population, Density, Climate, Language, etc.
3. Psychographic: Lifestyle, Interest, Opinions, Concerns, Values, Personality, Attitude, etc.
4. Behavioral: Usage, Intent, Engagement, Benefits Sought, Life Stage, etc.

By collecting this data in surveys, census reports and media consumption analysis, you are able to define who the ideal target audience for your product is, and what the best way is to reach them from a marketing standpoint.

Goals & Objectives:

Creating goals and objectives as a brand will allow you to successfully progress positively. By determining what your brands strengths and weaknesses are—through a SWOT analysis—you are able to identify what goals and objectives to set. A goal can explain a broad intangible idea that you want to achieve, and an objective outlines through steps how you can attain and achieve those goals. In comparison to goals, objectives are tangible and when set to be completed within a specific time frame, can be increasingly successful.

When planning your objectives it is crucial that they are SMART objectives:

S: Specific

M: Measurable

A: Attainable

R: Relevant

T: Timely

The focus of these objectives may be specific steps in increasing engagement, exploring different types of social media, feedback from customers etc., and by setting small objectives for each, these goals can be achieved.

Competition:

A competitor analysis is an assessment on what the strengths and weaknesses are. This kind of analysis enables you to identify in what ways competing brands compare to your own brand, giving you a clear picture of where you stand in the market. Providing you a benchmark of growth, stability and regression.

By getting to know your competition and areas they have succeeded or failed in, allows you as the competing brand to out-perform them in specific areas, which if done correctly could see some engagement decrease in competing brands, increasing your own engagement and audience.

Content Creation:

Content Marketing is a crucial part of our ever expanding digital market. As more brands take to social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and TikTok for advertising and brand expansion, the larger the audience the brand reaches in turn increases brand recognition.

Content Marketing consists of but is not limited to:

• Blogs
• Youtube Videos
• Content Placement
• Infographics
• Podcasts

This strategy component not only allows your brand to keep up to date with digital trends, yet enables you to build a larger audience, converting from other brands, maintaining customer loyalty and much more.

Measurement:

After the marketing campaign has run, it is important to know how successful it was in line with the goals and objectives you created at the beginning. By identifying what went well, what didn’t and what improvements can be made for the future, enables you to ensure the objectives, goals and tasks you completed are being properly managed.

This can be identified through measuring:

1. Reach
2. Brand mentions
3. Brand name search
4. Average Time on Page
5. Total visits
6. Click-through rate (CTR)

By doing this it enables your brand to have positive growth and keeps you in line with the goals and objectives set earlier in the marketing process.

A marketing strategy when planned thoroughly and completed effectively can be extremely successful for businesses both big and small. These 5 components when incorporated into your marketing plan gives you the opportunity to not only succeed above competitors but thrive and grow as an individual business.

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