A simple guide to creating a marketing strategy

In my 10+ years of working in marketing & working in marketing agencies, I’ve come to one conclusion:

Nearly all brands do marketing in some shape or form, but hardly any of them have an actual strategy. 

To illustrate this point I’ll tell you a story. I had a conversation a while ago with a brand that was interested in working with us at Next Chapter. In our initial discovery call I was going through our usual scoping questionnaire and trying to find out what marketing they had been doing to date, how much they had been spending and what kind of return they had been getting. 

I quickly established they had been investing heavily in paid search and META advertising, they had around 30,000 followers on Instagram – so a good amount but not masses – and they had an email subscriber list of around 25,000. The average purchase value was around £300 & across all marketing outputs the cost per acquisition was £70. 

All in all, pretty good. So I began to question to myself where we would actually be able to add value and where the biggest areas might be that we could improve. I didn’t have any immediate ideas coming to me, so I asked for a copy of the marketing strategy to be shared. My thoughts being if I could review some results against the strategy something might jump out at me. 

This is where we established the problem. They didn’t have a clear, documented strategy outlining the goals and objectives or the personas. They all had “a good idea” of what their strategy was, who they were trying to reach and what they were trying to achieve, but nothing actually planned out and written down to refer to. For me this was the immediate area where I established we were able to add value. And this is the four step process we went through with this brand to determine and outline their marketing strategy. 

Now those of you that have already researched the steps to creating a marketing strategy yourself online will have seen other articles like “7 steps to creating a marketing strategy”, or “10 step process for writing a marketing strategy”. I’m not saying those articles are wrong or those processes are wrong in any way, but for us at Next Chapter, these are our four proven steps for taking a brand from nothing to something valuable. 

Working in a B2B company? Take a look at our guide to your B2B marketing strategy.

Step 1 – Goals & Objectives

Before planning a journey you start with the destination. What is it that we need to achieve with our marketing? Start with your Macro 12-month goals – these are the big ones that the entire business is working to achieve. £5 million revenue, 20% increase on revenue vs. last year, 60% revenue coming from existing customers. 

Once you’ve outlined these, then you need to map out your Micro goals. These are the smaller marketing focussed goals you need to achieve to be able to deliver the Macro goals. 3% conversion rate on your website, 34,000 users onto your website every month, or increase the subscriber list by 10%. Smaller measurable goals you can directly impact with marketing outputs that are going to support the wider business in meeting the large financial Macro goals. If you’re struggling with determining what the numbers should be or how much a % increase there should be, a good place to start is to look at what you achieved in the last financial year. If your revenue needs to increase by 20%, then so does the number of people landing on your website & the number of leads you need to generate, for example. 

Step 2 – Personas

This is where as marketers we need to use our imagination and utilise the resources we have around us. I’d recommend you aim for at least three different personas, three different types of people your brand wants to, or already does, sell to. 

Ask yourself the following questions for each one, in this example we have a female persona named Tara:

– What is Tara’s background & lifestyle like? By this I mean does she work in a large team, is she an independent business owner who wears many hats, is she a single mum who works part time, or a young professional living in an inner city. 

– What are Tara’s reasons for purchasing? These are her reasons for purchasing your product or service, as well as her reasons for purchasing from you. 

– What are my key messages that will resonate with Tara? This one should be quite straight forward. Free delivery, lifetime guarantee, 30 years experience, etc. 

– What is Tara influenced by? Instagram, her mum, her personal trainer, This Morning. 

– What does Tara’s purchasing journey look like? Does she buy straight away, does she think about it for 2 weeks, does she save up over a couple of months. 

If at any point you’re struggling with any of the above and thinking “I work in marketing, I don’t really interact with our customers that much” – ask the people who are in Sales teams or Customer Service teams. These are the kinds of people that will be able to support you and help you in this step of the process. 

Have you been using AI tools yet within your marketing? Take a look at Next Chapter’s favourite FREE AI tools for marketers.

Step 3 – Channels & Journey

The marketing funnel. I’ve seen thousands over the years, different colours, some with 4 stages, some with 7. I don’t like any of them. I’ve got one big issue with a marketing funnel and that is that it has a bottom. It stops. We invest and nurture people until they become customers, and in some versions of the funnel, loyal customers, then we forget about them and ditch them. 

At Next Chapter we prefer the Flywheel – because it’s a wheel and it doesn’t end. It keeps going and going. When we delight a customer we then use marketing tactics and channels to keep them engaged, build brand loyalty and brand affinity to keep them coming back. 

There are three stages to the Flywheel:

– Attract

– Engage

– Delight

Example of channels and where they fit into these stages:

– Attract – SEO, organic content, advertising, events, samples

– Engage – website forms, chatbots, social media inbox

– Delight – vouchers, loyalty schemes, email marketing, exclusive access to content

Keep in mind your personas, what their journey looks like and what influences them, plus map out your channels into these three stages – will this channel attract them, engage them, or delight them? 

Step 4 – Content Pillars

Content is the biggest blocker to brands doing amazing marketing. They either don’t have it, or they don’t know how to get it. Defining the content pillars for your brand can be an excellent way of ensuring you have a pre-set guide & steer on the content your brand should be creating & the topics you should be talking about. Within each of these topics, you then list out all the subtopics within that you can talk about in your marketing. 

For example, if you’re a homeware brand, your content pillars could be:

– Design

– Sustainability

– Practicality

And the subtopics could be:

– Design : colour schemes, textures, fabric, patterns, lighting

– Sustainability : recycled materials, recycling in the home, sustainable sourcing, ethical production

– Practicality : storage, 10 year guarantee, flat pack, delivery options

Outlining these topics & subtopics helps give your content creators and planners a guide to work from, but also will help when it comes to internal linking of your landing pages and content pieces. A thorough and well planned internal linking structure will lead to big SEO gains and higher rankings.

Next Chapter, creating bespoke marketing strategies that work for you

And that’s the four step process that we’ve seen to be extremely valuable and successful in helping our clients either get going with their marketing efforts, or reset and refocus their marketing efforts. 

My closing piece of advice & overall key takeaway is – with every piece of marketing, ask yourself the below questions first:

Who am I trying to reach?

What do I want them to do?

And why? What goal is this going to support?

If you’d like help or support in creating your marketing strategy, or making your strategy a reality, then the team here at Next Chapter would be more than happy to help.  Get in touchand let us know how we can help.

Want more tips from the Next Chapter team? Learn how to be more organised in 4 easy stepsor take a look at our marketing insights.