What is strategic marketing and why it is important

With the increasing number of online advertisers in the digital era, grabbing the users’ attention to your brand name is easier said than done. A crystal-clear marketing strategy is of utmost importance for your PPC ads and search engine optimization process to achieve the best advertising ROI. Having a marketing strategy helps you understand who your competitors are and what marketing process you need to follow to be ahead of them. The strategic marketing process needs to be implemented in a way that is in line with the PPC trends, SEO trends, etc., to increase the user’s trust in your brand. When the marketing plan is implemented in sync with the marketing trends, it helps you have clear insights into your target audience, thus increasing impression share, generating leads, driving traffic, improving the conversion rate and whatever your business goals may be.

A marketing strategy is crucial to steer your business in the right direction. It helps you identify the key areas you need to target to be ahead of your competitors. No matter how unique your products or services are, you will always determine competition when performing niche marketing to reach your target audience. So, you need to work on a marketing process that helps build brand awareness, rank higher on the SERPs, etc., at present and keep pace with the ever-changing marketing dynamics to lure visitors to your landing page in the future. With the easy availability of various marketing tools, you can figure out the PPC metrics and SEO metrics you need to work on. This blog will help you understand what strategic marketing is and how it can help you perform competitive analysis that delivers more efficient and better results.

What is strategic marketing

The strategic marketing process involves conducting marketing research, performing competitive analysis, determining the demand of products and services and then establishing a marketing plan that will maximize the effort of overall marketing strategy. When performing strategic marketing, you need to have a clearly defined marketing goal like brand awareness, maintaining thought leadership, improving customer value, etc. With strategic marketing, you will have a competitive advantage that helps your ad budget from getting wasted on irrelevant clicks and provide better returns for your business.

Strategic marketing is the use of marketing disciplines to achieve business goals by developing a sustainable competitive advantage. A marketing strategy dictates your business to follow a set path. It is a blueprint of how you should implement the marketing tactics. It addresses high-level considerations such as which online platforms to target, conducting keyword research to choose the relevant type of keyword, choosing the type of ad campaign, social media platforms, etc. With the strategic marketing process, you can prepare a PPC report or SEO report to determine various KPIs to improve the performance of your ad campaign.

The marketing strategy process helps you figure out the competitors and gain pertinent information about their marketing plans to achieve their target goals. A defined marketing plan is essential so that your marketing process does not get lost in the digital advertising world. With competitive analysis, you empower your marketing knowledge and fill any marketing gap that would lower your website ranking on the search engine, understand why users leave your website, etc. Some points that strategic marketing covers are mentioned below.

Defining marketing objectives – It is critical for your business to understand the purpose of digital advertising clearly. A clearly defined marketing objective helps you work smartly on keyword bidding, write efficient ad copies, perform a/b testing, fill forms, sign-ups, etc.

Defining your product offerings – Your business may have product or services offerings that are already present in the market or maybe unique in its offerings. With a marketing strategy, you can choose to write excellent product page descriptions, write unique content, etc. If your business deals with e-commerce products, defining your product becomes even more critical, as the e-commerce industry has products that keep evolving during the holiday season, New Year time, etc.

Identifying where your target audience comes from – With the help of strategic marketing, you can prepare a PPC report or SEO report to identify where your target audience comes from. With the help of an attribution report, you can figure out the path that the relevant users follow to reach your website. Whether you are just starting with digital marketing or have been in business for some time, the marketing plan would help you know where your target audience is as you do not wish to target black hat

With fierce competition in the digital advertising world, you cannot just rely on luck to see visitors reach your website. You can work on a go-to-market strategy to attract more users to your website by highlighting your product offerings and what benefits they would get after using your products or services. You can identify your target audience with the help of social media marketing, from Google Display Network, running Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, YouTube Ads, etc. After identifying the target audience in your go-to-market strategy, you can build a buyer persona to make the users reach your website. You can work on in-market audiences or choose custom audiences to increase traffic to your website. You can also perform remarketing to get in touch with the users with the help of e-mail marketing, content marketing, etc.

Competitive positioning – You can identify the areas you need to work on in your go-to-market strategy like optimizing keywords, writing great content, canonical tags, etc. Once you have complete clarity on your objective and offering, strategic marketing would help you determine where your business ranks in the competitive market. This competitive positioning would help you improve your ad rank, better ranking on SERPs, etc. The strategic marketing process would help you to work on marketing strategy keeping the user intent in mind so that the relevant audience chooses your brand name whenever a keyword or search term related to your business is entered.

Importance of strategic marketing

Understanding the market – One of the central importance of strategic marketing is that you just do not enter the digital advertising world randomly. There are a lot of parameters to consider in your marketing strategy plan and working on all would be a challenging task. Implementing a marketing process helps you work on track and not get lost with diverse marketing options.

A crucial part of starting a new business or optimizing the already operating business is understanding your industry and the type of market you are serving. It helps you analyze the competition in the market and which marketing strategy plan would provide you with growth in your user base. Some of the benefits of understanding the market are mentioned below.

- Effective communication – With the market strategy plan, you get to communicate effectively with the relevant audience. You can get in touch with them through product or service promotions and inform them how your offerings are different from others. By researching the users, you get to have a deeper understanding of the audience insights, their buying habits, etc. and then in the go-to-market strategy; you can optimize campaigns to meet their specific interests.

- Marketing opportunities – Another point of understanding the market in your marketing strategy plan is that you get to know the multiple opportunities available in the market. It helps you to fill the marketing void. In your go-to-market strategy, you can work on building a buyer persona so that your products or services meet their needs. You can identify opportunities to run a business in areas where a huge amount of target audience is present and you had not considered them earlier in the marketing process. It helps to know the areas where there is comparatively less competition and helps to improve online sales.

Demand for products and services – The marketing process helps to understand whether the products or services that you are offering are in demand or not. The marketing process helps to know whether the users are actually looking for products or services you are offering. It enables you to analyze whether there is a need for an upgrade to your offerings or any changes required so that more users visit your website.

The marketing process helps analyze user behavior and what types of products or services they are most interested in. The marketing strategy plan helps to know which products or services are in high demand. The demand is always explained from the users’ point of view. The prices also vary accordingly; the more the products are in demand, the higher are the prices in the market. This marketing process helps the marketer work on decision-making. Some of the points that it benefits them with are mentioned below.

1. Sales forecasting with greater accuracy.
2. Work on sales promotion program.
3. Production planning and improvement.
4. Size of the market and corresponding market share.

Creating achievable market goals – The marketing process helps to set achievable market goals. The more practically feasible your marketing goals are, the easier it is to plan a strategy to achieve them. You need to ensure that your efforts are measurable to quantify your results. Different businesses have different marketing goals like brand awareness, lead generation, etc. Some essential benefits of having an achievable marketing goal for your business are listed below.

1. Increases click-through rate.
2. Lowers the bounce rate of your website.
3. Improve sales.
4. Monitor the progress of your business regularly.
5. Optimize on-page and off-page SEO.
6. Improve organic traffic to the website.

Marketing budget – A marketing budget is a detailed roadmap that outlines the overall cost of all marketing efforts involved in achieving the projected results. The marketing budget outlines all the money that a business intends to spend. These budgets can vary from paid advertising, web content, images and videos, spending on video marketing, artificial intelligence and automation tools, etc.

Different businesses have different marketing goals, so the marketing budget varies accordingly. Determining the amount you allocate across all of these marketing tactics and efforts requires understanding the target audience, type of market, etc. Some points to consider when deciding on a marketing budget are listed below.

1. Analyze your marketing area.
2. Outlining your marketing funnel to see what is the conversion rate.
3. Highlighting your operational cost.
4. Identifying your competitors.
5. Creating your marketing plan.
6. Allocating budget accordingly.

Return on investment – Return on investment is an important KPI to determine the profitability of an expenditure. It is helpful in the marketing process as it reduces the guesswork for future marketing business decisions. It is a must to be considered by businesses of any size to monitor the results of the marketing efforts. By calculating ROI, you can better understand how well your business is doing and which areas need improvement to achieve your business goals.

The return on investment involves every minute element of your strategy from marketing, spending on your employees, using paid tools(if any), etc., and finally, how much sales you generate. Calculating your marketing ROI gives you valuable insight that you can use to better your marketing strategy. ROI calculation gives you numerous advantages like knowing how much impact your business has among the target audience, analyzing whether you are overspending or not, areas of concern that need to be optimized, and then implementing your marketing strategy accordingly. It helps to know where to spend the marketing budget and work on particular segments to get better returns.

Phases of strategic marketing

Planning phase – The first and essential part of your marketing strategy plan is to work on the planning phase. It helps you have a marketing strategy keeping the marketing trends in mind. In your marketing strategy, you need to keep your ads relevant to increase users’ trust in your brand. The planning phase helps you analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your ad campaign and the necessary steps that need to be implemented to improve its performance. Some points that you need to focus on in this phase to maximize the results of your marketing strategy are:
- Analyzing the performance of competitors.
- Research for the current position of the business.
- Identifying the trends for your product or services.

You should then develop a marketing strategy plan that is trackable and measurable. You need to identify the users’ needs and then plan your marketing strategy accordingly so that the users do not leave your website. To determine the users’ needs, you can target the unique selling proposition(USP) of the visitor. This would help you have a user-friendly website deign so that the user navigation on the website is easy to take the intended action.

In this marketing strategy phase, you can define your products or services price, which product promotion strategy you would follow, etc. You can work on audience segmentation to ensure that your products or services are easily categorized and displayed to the users accordingly. You can consider dividing your ad groups and ad campaigns based on demographic targeting so that your ads do not appear to the irrelevant search queries.

Analysis phase – Analysis of any marketing strategy is essential as it helps you to figure out how your marketing strategy is working. The analysis phase involves working on market research and performing competitor analysis to determine how your campaigns are performing. To analyze the performance of your market strategy, you can prepare a report. The data-driven reports clearly highlight the metrics that you need to optimize to get better results. Some points to focus on in your strategic marketing plan are discussed below.

1. Work on data rather than assumption.
2. Analyze performance metrics.
3. Your marketing efforts are driving relevant traffic or not.
4. Webpages that have maximum number of users.
5. Choosing high-traffic relevant keywords.

Development phase – Once you have a clear idea of your marketing strategy, the next point you need to focus on is the development phase. The development phase helps you highlight the significant areas of concern that need to be optimized. In this phase, you need to clearly understand the points to be worked on to develop an interest among the users to stick to your brand name for the products or services you are offering.

The development phase needs to be implemented smartly. You need to figure out what works well in your marketing strategy and what does not. E.g., At times, you may have to spend a bit more to generate leads to your landing page. So, you need to work on bid adjustment to ensure that your ad budget does not get wasted. You can choose keywords that rank higher on the SERPs, optimizing images, etc. In this phase, you can figure out the duplicate content on the website and update the relevant content. You can include new products and update your services with the latest trends to increase your brand’s trust.

Implementation phase – The implementation phase is the action phase of the marketing strategy. All marketing strategies you work on will be implemented in this phase. The implementation phase directly influences the target audience. So, you need to be completely sure that you are good to go live to connect with the target audience. Some points that you need to focus on in the implementation phase are.

1. All marketing tactics are put in place.
2. All the marketing errors are resolved.
3. All the display URLs and final URLs are working correctly.
4. The 301 and 302 redirects(if any) are working correctly.

Evaluation phase – After all the marketing plan is put into action, you need to work on the evaluation phase. This would help you to know whether the strategic marketing efforts are correctly implemented or not. The evaluation phase helps to know whether the visitors are moving down the marketing funnel or not. The evaluation phase helps to have a detailed overview of your strategic marketing efforts. You get to know whether all your action plans are working fine or require any changes to be done. To analyze the SEO campaign performance, you can go through your users’ reviews and include their suggestions in your marketing strategy to provide them with better products or services next time.

Closing thoughts

Strategic marketing helps to use various marketing tactics that best suit your business. It helps you have a competitive advantage and get the best possible results for your business. By implementing a marketing process, you have all the control of your business in your hands. Once you have decided on your marketing strategy, you can draft a marketing plan that sets out all the marketing efforts to achieve the desired results. These plans should be updated constantly and reviewed regularly to meet the users’ needs.

The digital advertising world keeps evolving with the changes in marketing trends. To equip yourself with the best results from strategic marketing, you can get in touch with a digital marketing company. Every business wishes to get in touch with professionals who can perform market research and help them achieve their marketing goals. The experts have industry-oriented skills in digital analytics, web design & development, SEO copywriting, SEO audit, etc., to maximize your return with the strategic marketing process.

What is strategic marketing and why it is important